ego.istic.org

Catching up on FlipC's Christmas posts I saw his latest discussion of advertising materials, which reminded me of one I particularly noticed, for a brand of butter. I won't mention their name, not because of any threat of legal action, but because I can't remember: that's how good the advert was. (It definitely was not the brand suggested by the title of this article; I just couldn't resist the mild joke.)

The crucial part of the advert was that more people preferred their new spreadable “butter” product. Now, as trendy, media-savvy, bright, perceptive people, I'm sure you've already spotted the two misdirections in that claim. Both of these were revealed in the small print at the bottom of the screen, which was long enough and appeared for a short enough duration that I had to watch the advert three times to read it all. (This is in itself cause for concern. Perhaps concentrating so hard on trying to read the small print was what made me not notice which brand was being advertised. The short duration nearly made me start drafting a complaint to ASA then and there, until I realised I don't actually care.)

The first careful phrasing is the use of the word “more” rather than “most”. Of a sample of a few hundred (which is pretty respectable for this kind of survey, but still small enough for sampling error to be significant), 48% preferred the new product, thirty-something percent preferred the old product, and the remainder expressed no preference. So in fact, fewer than half of those surveyed preferred the new product, which doesn't make it sound that appealing.

It gets even less appealing when you realise that the voice-over doesn't say what they preferred it to. In fact, what they compared it against, and what more than 30% of subjects preferred, was the same brand's existing low-fat “butter” product, which, as my mum pointed out when we talked about this, “is disgusting anyway.”

All in all, it's probably for the best that I can't remember which brand was being advertised, as whereas before seeing the advert I might have been tempted to try it out, I wouldn't go near it now I know that the only thing they could find to say it is better than (and even then only just) is something I wouldn't buy. Evidently their mothers never taught them that if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything.

I'm sorry to say that my work has an entertaining flaw in its advertising material at the moment. We have a demo video; it's quite good in itself, and it's even on Youtube. The Youtube video is also embedded on a page of our website. The problem is that when the video finishes playing it shows links to some related videos. (As Adobe doesn't support Flash on my platform, and I don't have it installed on my work machine either, I didn't find this out until I showed the video to a friend on their computer.) You may not be surprised to hear that our competitors' demo videos often find themselves in this list.

It's not as bad as it sounds: the embedding on our site is a stop-gap solution because of a delay encoding and uploading a decent-quality, high-res copy. But it's just another example of the dangers of putting the interaction between you and your customers under the control of third-party software vendors like Adobe and Google.