Advertisements upset me. They seem designed to appeal to the misinformed, uninformed, or gullible; preying upon every emotional and logical weakness they can find. I often find myself insulted on behalf of humanity that the people behind these schemes think so little of humanity. And yet, ads persist, likely because they work on enough of the population to be sustainable (not unlike a virus). For a time I was happy knowing I was hopefully above the sort to be tricked by underhanded marketing, I recently reached a breaking point and wanted to push back against the nonsense. And thus this series was born. Welcome to…
Anti-Viral Ads:
A Regular Critique of Advertising Nonsense
DirecTV is launching a new HD TV DVR (high-definition television digital video recorder, in case you didn’t already know) system they’re calling the Genie. I saw an ad for this new service and knew I’d need to cover it for a short and sweet column in this series. Yet again I can’t find an embedded-able link to this particular ad but it’s the one where a couple are complaining about how terrible cable is with smash cuts to obnoxious situations like having an airline seat next to a constantly cackling ventriloquist’s dummy. And no, this column isn’t about the nonexistence of magical autonomous dummies (at least not today…).
The reason this commercial has earned my ire is their failure to properly represent fractions. That’s right, fractions. After my math flub in last week’s column consider this my mea cupla. At one point the the screen shows that the couple’s current DVR has 0% space left thus preventing them from recording more content (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Because some days you’d rather just keep recording than actually watch anything.
But then! A magical genie that looks just like a woman in a spangly dress and nothing like a flame monster from Arabic mythology. Her powers expand the DVR storage space to three times its current size! Now my expectation was that the bar would shift from being completely full to 1/3 full. See if you follow me: If you had 1 GB of storage and it was full, then you were upgraded to 3 GB of storage you would have 1 GB out of 3 GB filled, or 33%. So imagine my surprise when that was not what happened. Instead the storage capacity jumps by between 11-12x its original amount, leaving the filled space as but a sliver of the current capacity (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2. Who wouldn’t want a stranger coming into their home controlling their TV, right?
To be fair, the ad on the does have the following fine print:
Based on hours of HD recording with one Genie HD DVR setup (model HR34 only).
Which doesn’t really clear up anything at all, but never let it be said I obfuscated some piece of information that would exonerate the offending marketer.
Is this a nitpick? Probably, and honestly I’d accept, and realistically expect, DirecTV to fudge a little bit on this one. Of course they want to make their product look as impressive as possible, but doing it in such a brazen way that anyone with any sense of numbers would balk is dishonest and unconvincing. Americans are bad enough at math without the company actively trying to keep them planted to the couch piling on with an inappropriate sense of scale.
In the end, seeing as I’m such a nice guy and all, I went ahead and fixed the add using photo-editing technology making it roughly 3x more accurate (Fig. 3). I invite DirecTV to use my correction and update their ad, it’s just that easy. And as I sit here rubbing the lamp on my desk, I’ll be wishing that advertisers utilize at least 5th grade level math the next time they’re putting together a new campaign.
Fig. 3. Fixed it!
Thanks, Ryan. I’m also annoyed by the vast majority of advertising out there, because it’s extremely biased and perpetuates ignorance. I appreciate the consumer advocacy you’re providing as a public service. But I’d like to request that you check your grammar more carefully–especially your word usage. When I read something like “it’s current size”, I experience the cognitive equivalent of slamming into a brick wall. Apostrophes have no place in possessive pronouns. Thank you.
And I thought my column was a nitpick…
Thanks for the catch, I’ve updated my piece.
What about starting a sentence with a conjunction? As in ‘But I’d like to…’.
Doesn’t really bother me.
It could also delete most of the stuff recorded on the DVR. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/did-the-directv-genie-delete-your-stuff/
I love the spelling and grammar police!
The DVR question that baffles me is, who has the time to spend watching that much TV?
What annoys me is when some ad boasts that you can save “up to” some value of dollars, or some similar usage of the term “up to”. All that term does is define an upper limit, which is meaningless in most of the contexts it is used. “Product X will let you lose up to 100 pounds!” That is a factual statement if you lose anything between 0 and 100 pounds.
Or, for that matter, if you gain 100 pounds.
Even better is when an ad says, “you will save up to hundreds of dollars!” Those ads drive my math mind nuts.
Alternatively, “up to 3x MORE storage” could mean 3 times as much again, leaving the used section as 1/4 of the total.
Just sayin’
If you want to be really picky, some sales adverts say items are “Up to half price”, which could be taken as “No more than half price”…
My pet peeve is the ads for processed foods that use the word ‘contains’, as in ‘contains real fruit juice’ or ‘contains whole grains’. This means nothing! It could have a miniscule amount of the healthy product and the rest of it is junk.
> If you had 1 GB of storage and it was full, then you were upgraded to 3 GB of storage you would have 1 GB out of 3 GB filled, or 33%.
I imagine these DVR guys might want to have a word with you about misrepresenting the size of the hard drive they’re offering, in a nit picky sort of way. It did make me wonder who was crazy enough to brag about a 1GB HDD…
And if you want them to use your correction, upgrade to GIMP bro. I can count the pixels.
Not my fault they don’t say how big their HD is.
And the point of the correction was that it was supposed to look terrible. Sheesh.
I’ve seen this commercial a few times, and never noticed the 3x more storage bar.
Hey! What do you know? There’s a TV in that ad!
This all begs the point… is there really enough record-worthy content on TV to fill the original DVR up in the first place?
The ads that make my spine curl are the ones where car owners state how long they can drive between gas fill-ups. Of course they never give the size of the gas tank. So, if a car has a fuel tanker following near behind and attached through a fuel hose they might not need to fill for several years or more. I wish advertisers would state two-part measurements such as kilometers per 65 liter tank or something we can work with.