Wednesday, January 20, 2010

False Advertising

As I was watching good morning America this morning I saw a commercial that irked me.  Yes, I'm easily provoked.  :-) Actually, I saw two commercials this morning which contained wrong information. The first, was a commercial for vitamins. In this commercial they stated that the vitamin supplement they were advertising helps to build strong cell walls. First of all, all animals including humans do not have cell walls. Only plants have cell walls. Animals have cell membranes. The difference between the two is cell walls are made up of cellulose and cell membranes are made up of a phospholipid bilayer.

Now, I’m sure most people will never realize the mistake in this commercial. And, it’s probably no big deal. But to me, it is false advertising. Unless of course the vitamin company was targeting plants in their commercial. Which, of course they weren’t. You would think, that someone would catch the mistake. Or perhaps they did it on purpose. I don’t know, but, it’s irritating to me. If the vitamin company can’t even get the proper terminology in their commercials, I have no confidence that they are capable of making vitamin supplements properly.

The second commercial that I saw this morning was for a local medical center. The premise of the commercial was to have ordinary, medically uneducated people spouting off sentences containing medical terminology. This commercial happened to be teenagers skateboarding. One of them falls and the others start saying what could be wrong with him, using medical terminology that perhaps the doctors would use. But the problem with this commercial is, a least one of the things they said it did not make sense. Now, I wasn’t paying close attention to the commercial but I did hear them say, “he tweaked his medial malleolus.” how do you twist sharply or pinch a bump on a bone? I suppose anything is possible but, this is not the terminology a medical professional would use.

Anyway, this is what I was thinking about this morning as I was watching TV. I’m sure most people will not even know there is anything wrong with these commercials. But I don’t like the fact that the people producing the commercials are trying to trick or deceive the public. At least that’s how I perceive it.

That’s my two cents.

2 comments:

  1. I tweaked my hyoid bone trying to hit a high note last night while singing...not really.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I probably shouldn't comment right now, because I am in quite the irritated mood too. :)
    Obviously the people who made those two commercials do not even have a clue what they are talking about because if they did, they would have used the proper terminology.
    Good grief. I have not seen TV in a long time, so I haven't seen them, but I believe they are as ridiculous as you are saying they are. Nothing surprises me anymore. The world is full of deceit and people out to take advantage of others.
    I am surprised people would try and pull off stuff like that when they know there are plenty of people with biological and medical knowledge. You think they would do some simple research before putting their ads all over the television to make complete fools of themselves.

    ReplyDelete