Consumer Safety & Awareness Part 30

Advertising Scams
(Part 4 – Deception Through Comparison)


My dog’s better than your dog. (Taken from a pet food commercial in the 1970s.) That can be extended to any topic – my car, my home alarm company, my clothing line, my anything you want to buy. Comparing one item with another, whether similar or totally different, is an advertising gimmick that has been around for ages.

No matter what you compare, unless it’s an item to itself, any such action is deceitful and unfair. By law (copywrite and patent) no two products can be alike. Fords and Toyoda, Sealy and Perfect Sleeper, Coke and Pepsi. The best thing about having different products that fill in a similar nitch is that every person is unique, and our interests and likes differ.

When an advertisement uses taste tastes, or softness tests, or whatever comparison they use, you can bet the people they select for their poll are very carefully chosen. One of the criticisms placed on President Bush was that he stacked his community meetings with loyal Republicans and anyone who showed disagreement was removed from the hall. Can you imagine partisan political polls where the Republican tally only fanatical religious conservatives and the Democrats select gay-rights, pro-choice atheists? The results will be rather skewed.

So when a medicine is selected by 9 out of ten doctors, one must question whether those physicians (we assume in such cases that “doctor” = medical practitioner and not someone with a Doctorate in Engineering) have received massive amounts of that product as free samples, or whether they work for the company in question.

No poll, no sample, will ever ask all the qualified people. Political polls question perhaps a few thousand and extrapolate the results based on scientific and statistical principles. An advertising company has no such requirement. They can place their sample in tiny print somewhere in the ad, and keep it on the screen for five seconds. If they even do that much.

Nine out of ten cans prefer Friskies? Perhaps that was the only food they have been fed for the last three months and what they are used to.

Nine out of ten people prefer Blue Bonnet? Perhaps their only other choice was a product that had been specifically chosen for its poor quality.

Even worse are commercials that compare parts of their product to parts of others. I have no idea how many types of cars are available in the United States (and am too lazy to research that at the moment). When a vehicle commercial says their model gets better mileage than Car B as well as a better ride than Car C, and costs less than Car D, my first thought is that Cars B, C, and D must then have dozens of aspects better than the advertised vehicle.

Obviously no ad can compare the top 50 or so most important facets of an automobile (and even that would vary depending on who you talk to). That is why Consumer Reports has an annual car issue – so we can compare such things, and get our information from a mostly reliable independent source. That is why Motor Trends, Car & Driver, and dozens of other automotive magazines also provide such information.

So let’s use those magazines – “Our car was chosen best in its class by Motor Trend.” Isn’t that also using a comparison? Perhaps Car & Driver selected another vehicle. Perhaps Motor Trend select it, yet had many things to criticize. No comparison commercial will ever give you a negative report on the item being sold.

(At this point I went out to do some shopping. I passed an ad for a law firm voted “The Best in the Hudson Valley.” The best what? Voted by whom? Compared to what other law firms?)

Advertisements must remain within the bounds of the law. Even the worst product can compare itself to something else and claim to be better, stronger, healthier, tastier, or less fattening. Comparisons are simply deceptive advertising.