Advertising Is Known to Utilize Various Strategies

Advertising is known to utilize various strategies in order to create an impact to the audience in selling a particular product, service, or even an idea or program. With the popularity and prevalence of quantitative research in the 20th century, it has become common among advertising agencies, whatever the medium, to utilize statistics in their ads in order to convince readers/consumers to patronize their product. However, this practice has been abused by advertisers who wanted to persuade and convince readers/consumers through the advertisement. Thus, statistics have been used to create the impression that the ad's claim is validated through research, which are not always the case and the truth.

Misinterpretation or generalization through statistics has resulted to misleading claims and arguments that confuse, instead of informing, the audience. Take as an example the print ad released by the organization Asian Pals of the Planet in the August 23, 2004 issue of Newsweek magazine. The ad aims to bring awareness of water conservation by stating, "In the last 30 years, the world's water supply has halved." Above this statement, the illustration "H1/2O" is shown with below another statement, "(treat water with respect)." This claim, if the informed reader knows it, is too general and in fact, does not speak true of the state of water supply in the world today. The ad claims that water supply has been halved, when in truth, according to a United Nations study, while water supply has alarmingly decreased in the last 30 years, it has not reached into half its amount, as what the organization wants to elucidate. The use of the rhetoric of fear, by threatening that water supply is increasingly depleting, makes the ad effective, yet misleading for the readers, illustrating how statistical figures are used to 'distort' the truth. Thus, the ad ceases to become informative yet maintains its persuasiveness, by misinterpreting statistical results in the said advertisement.

A similar form of misinterpretation through the use of misleading information is utilized in the New York Times Magazine last October 24, 2004, wherein the writer, Lionel Schwartz, reacts to a previous New York Times article arguing that cocoa flavanols may lengthen life expectancy, due to its ability to dilate blood vessels, which helps reduce blood pressure in the human body. Schwartz then suggests that there is parallelism between cocoa flavanols and Viagra, wherein the latter also demonstrates the capacity to regulate blood flow.