my favorite advertising shenanigans

I've always been fascinated with the many ways TV advertisements trick and deceive their viewers, but lately, it's been even more amazing. Here are few of my favorite new gimmicks, with some classic ones thrown in for kicks:

4. "I'm trying my own sleep study between Advil and Tylenol!" says the guy who's being payed by Advil to do a commercial for them where it looks like he is, by his own motivation, doing a sleep study between two competing products, to see which one works better. Advil isn't the company going out of its way to make their advertisements look more like an unbiased experiment from an uncompromised third party than an advertisement of their own product. It's like a new (and more sinister) version of the paid testimonial.

3. "Now you can buy more of our product!" This comes from a recent trend in canned air freshener commercials, where they advertise, as an added bonus, the ability to make the air freshener automatically release itself every 9-18 minutes, as if it was a good thing. Clearly the long life of a single can of air freshener was hindering sales and they needed to find a better way to make people use more of the product, so they would have to buy more frequently. The amazing thing is that they actually market this new feature as an added bonus! They might as well just say "We made it easy to run out of our product as fast as possible so you can come back and buy more!" Thanks, Airwick guys.

2. Just showing hot girls making out with guys who use their product: I'm constantly surprised how often people pull this one, but I shouldn't be, because it's all over the place. Sometimes the point is really that simple, just a straight up lie. "Use our product, and hot girls will make out with you." it's demeaning from both sides, but neither the marketer nor the consumer can get over this one.

1. Inventing better statistics: This one has been around forever. For example, "9 out of 10 dentists recommend this kind of gum!" Everyone should know by now that this is an overt "lie". I can say that 10 out of 10 dentists recommend this gum even if I question 10,000 dentists and only 10 of them say they recommend it. I just take the 10 that did recommend it, and I say that out of those 10 dentists, 10 of them recommended the gum. You'll never hear any commercial say that 9 out of EVERY 10 dentists recommended anything. They only say 9/10 instead of 10/10 because it sound reasonable enough to have more credibility than 10/10, and I only put quotes around "lie" because they're technically telling the truth. Their intent is still to make you think something that is untrue.

I think the reason I'm so fascinated with marketing schemes is that it unveils a dark truth about humanity that corporations have discovered: it's more profitable to tell everyone that you're product is amazing than to make a product that actually is amazing and market that instead.

Ok I promise, I will never write a post that long ever again.