Misleading Ads with guaranteed results or clinical studies
ID number: 111359
Written by: Kaltham Al Darmaki
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
One of the biggest issues the marketing industry has faced since its early days has been misleading ads which means hiding transparency or using false information of products to buy customers and increase companies’ income. According to a statistic in 2016, the size of misleading ads in whole world was about $800 billion while its size in Arab countries was about $60 billion, surly these numbers have increased because of multimedia specialty.
Misleading ads has many forms such as: cheating consumers using celebrities and influencers on social media to let them speak about the product or posting their images, Imitation of Website functionality, comparative information, lying with statistics by info graphs -in fact stats are easy to distort because most people don’t understand it even experts!
In 2009, Dr Fanelli’s study showed that 33.7% of data scientists use questionable research practice. It can result in modifying results and biased interpreting of data that help companies to create a good mislead advertisement.
The most popular issue was when Colgate claimed that 80% of dentists recommended the brand! Consumers believed that 80% of dentists recommended Colgate while 20% recommended other brands. It turns out that when dentists were surveyed, they could choose several brands not just one. According to The Telegraph newspaper, this completely misleading statistic was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority, but nowadays many brands of toothpaste promote their products using Brilliant words!
Photo taken by: Kaltham Al.Darmaki
As well as Reebok did with its shoes when they announced: Lab tests “proved” that the shoes work “your hamstrings and calves up to 11% harder and tone your butt up to 28% more than regular sneakers just by walking!”. The FTC stated that Reebok paid $25 million for this deceptive advertising.
So, we all have to use critical thinking and being aware of these kinds of advertisements especially what affect on our health or skin.
https://www.minerra.net/misuse-misleading-statistics/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1539715/Colgate-gets-the-brush-off-for-misleading-ads.html









