On Rhetoric in Advertising

Recently, a friend of mine commented on a currently-much-broadcast video ad, that she expected it had annoyed me. She was not wrong.

Advertising rhetoric means presenting your company’s product in a way that convinces potential purchasers that your product is a better buy than alternative products or not buying any products. You do this by making your product sound better and the alternatives sound worse, and, so long as you don’t make any claims that are vulnerable to litigation for being false or hateful, you’re fine. For example, in a commercial ad I saw this morning, there was a claim that a company’s make-up remover (I missed its name) removes “up to 99%” while their competitors’ products “leave up to 30% behind.” “Up to” is a great loophole! “Up to 99%” means that in ideal conditions in a lab it’s possible for the product to remove 99%, but chances are good that you’ll never get those results yourself. Let’s speculate that an average consumer without a lab or special training might get 80-90% removal—that seems reasonable. Now, “up to 30%” left behind means in the worst conditions and with a consumer who has no idea how to remove make up properly. Let’s say that your average consumer might leave 10-20% behind. This would mean that the advertised product would have exactly the same effectiveness as its competitors (80-90 off, 10-20 left), but their using the numbers 99 and 30 makes it sound as if it’s much better.

Because I don’t care about make-up myself, I tend not to get heated up about advertising rhetoric on its behalf. Because I am against laundry detergent and I work hard to save water, there are other ads that do annoy me. I remember during our time teaching on Zoom having a rant in an online synchronous class about a Tide Free commercial. It claimed that Tide Free contained no sulphates, no dyes, and no ammonia. I told my students that no laundry detergent currently uses sulphates, because there was a big stink about them being damaging to wildlife and the environment in the 1970s (though dishwasher detergents continued to use them for decades). I told my students that yes, most laundry detergents contain blue dye, to fool your eye into thinking your whites are a brighter white, but that it’s a minuscule amount of a dye having no proven or even suspected bad effects. And I told them that no current laundry detergents use ammonia bleach: they use hydrogen peroxide instead, as in fact Tide Free does, too. So, Tide Free is the same as regular Tide, but it’s a clear liquid instead of pale blue in colour. And in my experience, water and agitation in a washing machine get as much dirt out of your clothes as adding detergent to that same machine. If someone in your household has sensitive skin, just don’t buy laundry detergent—maybe they’re sensitive to perfume or hydrogen peroxide!

There’s another current Tide campaign that claims that you can save $130 a year by switching to using Tide in cold water…but you don’t need to use Tide to save that money, just switch to using cold water for your laundry! If you look on Tide’s website, you’ll find footnote disclaimers/explanations that watchers of the video ad don’t get, for example that these savings are “using a non-HE washing machine and switching all loads from hot to cold water, based on average electricity rate of (CA, 11.6c/kWh) and 8 loads per week” or that the claim that Tide cleans better in cold is in comparison to using baking soda (which has a tendency to clump in cold water). Your saving money depends on your previously having done lots of laundry a week and all in hot water—not on your using the Tide products. ... And, as someone who lives in a condo, even if I did do eight loads a week in hot water, I wouldn’t save money switching to cold because my bill is the average of the electrical use of all the units in my building.

The ad that my friend had assumed would anger me is for a dishwasher detergent, and its claims likewise have nothing to do with the product cleaning better than other detergents! The claim is that you can save water by running your dishwasher with a half load, because if you have a super-efficient dishwasher, then you’ll only use 15 litres of water “and a running sink uses that every two minutes” (four gallons in the US version). Hmm. If you turn the faucet on full and don’t put a stopper in the sink, perhaps—it depends on the power of your water pressure and the flow of your faucet, but it would be inefficient to wash your dishes that way. I’m very careful with water and can do the amount of dishes that would be a full load using only 5.5 litres of water (I’ve measured). Let’s say an average person not taking that much care uses 15 litres to wash the equivalent of a full load—that’s still better than 15 litres to wash the half load of the commercial ad. Yet Cascade has the legal right to claim that using their product could save water in comparison to a hypothetical bad washing by hand. And their product has nothing to do with how much water your dishwasher uses: it’s just suitable to use in highly efficient dishwashers, like every other detergent. Sigh.

It's sad that advertisers assume most consumers don’t have skills in critical thinking. This is where a university education comes in handy, even if it makes you more annoyed with ads. Consider taking a course in rhetoric! It’s really helpful to be able to see what’s going on in how you’re being sold stuff. 

P.S. About that current Peleton ad that claims 92% of people who get fitness equipment from them are still active one year later: they define "active" as paid-up members, not as people engaging in fitness routines regularly, and they make you pay for one year up front. What this suggests to me is that a) some unknown percentage of people renew their memberships, b) 8% of people get out of the contract in time, and c) an unknown percentage of people want to cancel but don't do it in time and they get renewed against their intention: a + c = 92 ... either that, or they're counting the 92% toward the end of the obligatory one-year period and 8% fight to get out of the deal before the year is up. In either case, that has nothing to do with whether people continue to use the equipment, and it could well be that lots use it as a coat rack a year later, as Peleton's sarcastic-but-dismissed voiceover commenter suggests!