Thursday, March 26, 2009
sneaky little commercial
So, I was watching television a little while back (nothing new there) when a commercial came on and grabbed my attention. Those of you who customarily read my blogs know that I have an affinity for infomercials since I find them so funny, but also how I hate the overt deception which they use.
Well, this commercial I saw was not an infomercial, but it had some cleverly written deceptive wording to it. I don't know if you've seen it or not, but let me know if you catch the deception before I make it clear. I don't think you'll miss it.
It was a cereal commercial (I don't remember the brand, so if the commercial rings a bell to you, please let me know which it was so I can track down the video of it.) It did the typical showing of kids eating this yummy, delicious cereal and then threw out an interesting fact. It was something along the lines of "studies have shown that kids who eat [name of cereal] do [insert percentage, maybe like 20 or something]% better in school than kids who don't eat breakfast."
I know I didn't have the verbatim script, but did you catch that sneakiness. If you didn't then read it again.
This says nothing about the quality of their cereal versus other breakfast foods. This simply shows us the advantage of eating breakfast in general. Notice they didn't say that the study showed how kids who eat their cereal do whatever % better in school than kids who eat other cereals. They generalize it by saying they do better than kids who don't eat cereal at all. Pardon my antiquated use of the following word but DUH!!! I've been taught my whole life that breakfast is important and beneficial to kids who eat it versus kids who don't. I don't want to know if your cereal is better than no breakfast at all...I want to know if it's better than other breakfast options.
Most people just listen to the nicely spun statistics and say, "Ooooh, gotta get me some of that!" without reading between the lines. Maybe I'm just picky but the commercial really annoyed me. Commercials are known for doing this.
Labels:
commercials,
deceptive,
random,
sneaky
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1 comment:
Commercials are both sneaky and confusing. There are lots of big words to discribe some commercials, such as innopropriate, diobolical, excasperating, and disturbing. How does anyone watch TV in peace with all those huge words floaten' around?
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