Consumer Safety & Awareness Part 28

Advertising Scams
(Part 2 – Deception Through Misdirection)

Advertisers probably enjoy watching magicians as both occupations employ deception through misdirection. The magician must get the audience to focus on something so as to deceive. Flourish a hand to get the eye over there while the other hand slips the trick card into the deck. Point out the lovely assistant while slipping the key to the lock into his mouth.

Deception is the hallmark of advertising as well. Want to sell a car? Point out the lovely color, the smiling 30-somethings looking through the showroom, say something cute and totally off the subject.

How else can you explain that during the last five years we have seen countless speeding cars on hairpin turns or driving fast through streets, totally void of other vehicles? Is this likely to be the way you drive? How about some honesty – like showing the car stuck in rush-hour traffic not moving? Oh, they use that one also, but somehow the car magically lifts above all the others and is suddenly moving along an empty country lane.

Why bother telling us about the many recalls and overpriced extras they force on us when they can show cars taking off after the showroom closed and driving around town on their own, or turning on their own radios and flashing their headlights to the rhythm of the music?

Five-star crash test results – what does that really tell you about the vehicle? Talking test dummies? Direct the audience’s attention away from their sales gimmicks and on to something that will make them remember the car’s name and model. What lovely music from the radio (I’m usually tuned to the traffic reports). What beautiful leather seats, which get boiling and sticky in hot weather and never warm up when it’s cold out.

Distract us by putting an entire household’s worth of toys in the back of the 8 MPG SUV, or showing how attractive the 12 MPG sports model is to people standing on the street. Yes, I am certainly going to buy a car just so that others can admire it.

Distract us by informing us only of the few good points of your product. It can cure heartburn, but the side effects may include diarrhea, headaches, sleeplessness, and inability to concentrate, while it kills off the good bacteria that help us properly digest our food. Let us know that id we eat your cereal for eight weeks we can drop our cholesterol from 200 to 192 while absorbing more salt than we should have in a day. Tell us about the great taste but not the additives that are under investigation because they may cause cancer, stroke, heart attacks, or hyperactivity in our children.

Political ads love to use misdirection. Candidate One accuses his opponent of not caring about the cost of prescription drugs. At the end of the ad you see it was paid for by the American Pharmaceutical Association. His opponent accuses Candidate One of being soft on crime while gun manufacturers are filling his campaign chest. Did he mention that last year he sponsored an early release bill for hard-core criminals?

Remember the purpose of advertisement – to get you to buy the product, the service, the concept, or the candidate. Do you thing Pepsi is ever going to have an ad stating that their blind taste-taste found people prefer Dr. Pepper? Such a study would be quickly destroyed. Nine out of ten doctors (who happen to work as researchers for the company) prefer the product the company makes (and the tenth was fired).

I watch commercials and read advertisements just to spot the fallacies in them. I have no intention of buying advertised products as there is probably other, just-as-good or better products (a little on-line research will discover them) that charge less because they do not have a $100 million ad campaign thus adding $2 to the cost of each item they sell. Remember that national brand companies make the no-name brands (do you think Safeway cans it’s own food?), which are then sold for half the price because they do not have to pay for advertising.

Quick, watch the flame coming from the magician’s left hand – he’s going to make quality, good deals, honesty, and integrity disappear with his right one.