Truth Decay: Is Advertising Honest?

We’re pleased to introduce a new lobe of the Beauty Brains: Scatter Brain. “Scatter” is actually a professional copywriter who’s worked in the beauty business. She’s one of the people responsible for those catchy advertising slogans that get stuck in your head.

Here’s Part 2 of Scatter Brain’s 4 part series on creative copywriting. Enjoy!

If a company is going spend a fortune marketing a product, they want to make bloody sure they are reaching the right audience with the right message. At this point, researchers, media planners, account executives and marketing strategists go into overdrive trying to determine who will buy this product and why. The “who” is known as demographics and demographics determine sex, age range, household income, geographic location etc. But, the process that tells us “why” someone might want to buy a product is known as psychographics. This is where researchers get into what consumers want, what concerns they might have and what will convince them that “x” product is the product that will meet those needs.

All of these deep thinkers draw up a marketing plan based on the information they’ve gathered and then it is sent to creative where artists, designers and writers formulate the best and hopefully most creative way to get this message across. Now let me just point out here that there is an axiom about “truth in advertising” and the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission have all sorts of rules and regulations about false claims and advertising, so you can be pretty sure that if a definitive claim is made, there is some research, however weak it may be, to back up that claim. Of course, from time to time, someone will tell a big whopper in an ad campaign and usually they get a hefty penalty. A recent example is Kevin Trudeau of infomercial fame. He’s been banned from making infomercials and fined a couple of million dollars by the FTC for making false claims about a calcium product that supposedly cures cancer.

This is an unfortunate stain on the advertising industry and a fairly rare occurrence, but it still pays to check all advertising claims if possible. If the FTC and the FCC are monitoring truthfulness then why should you bother checking things out? Well simply put, you can still be truthful but perhaps a tad misleading. This all takes place in the way advertising campaigns are written and the words and phrases and images that are used.

You’ve all seen the ads for a particular brand of gum that claims, “four out of five dentists recommend this gum to their patients who chew gum.” This is a completely true statement and I’m sure there is credible research to back up this claim. However, four out of five dentists is really eight out of ten dentists, which is 80%. Eighty percent is still a huge consensus, but which phrase makes it sound like the larger numbers of dentists agree? It’s the phrase “four out of five” because your brain automatically tells you, “Wow, only one dentist doesn’t recommend this gum.” Where if the claim had been “80% of dentists recommend this gum”, your brain would have said, “Jeez, twenty percent of dentists don’t recommend this product.” See the difference? It’s the same as pricing something at $9.95 or $10.00. Your brain automatically tells you that $9.95 is a lot less even though it’s only a nickel less than ten bucks. If you’d like to learn how this copywriting principle applies to cosmetic products, come back and read Part 3!

Scatter Brain is a real-life copywriter for hire. If you’re interested in contacting her with business opportunities, please write to “Scatter Brain” care of [email protected]