Every day advertising surrounds us; whether it be in our cars listening to the radio, researching on the internet or watching the television. Quite often, we come across an ad that we can automatically tell has been extremely dramatized to imply something false. A common example is the over-dramatization used in mascara commercials that feature models wearing fake eyelashes and don’t display the true effectiveness of their product to the consumer. Just last year, Bell Canada was forced to pay $10 million for misleading consumers about the real costs of phone, internet, satellite-TV and wireless services, through advertising that hid additional fees in fine-print disclaimers.
The Canadian Competition Law monitors the reliability of advertisements and provides consequences for misleading advertising. This Act requires that companies be able to prove the performance of their product using an “adequate and proper test” before making a claim. By doing so, this Act is diminishing a company’s ability to make a false claim about it’s product. For example, the Nutella company is no longer able to persuade parents to buy their children Nutella by advertising it as a healthy food since it contained dangerous levels of saturated fat and was more than 55 percent processed sugar. With these fines and strict laws in place, I hope to see the frequency of false advertisements decrease in Canada and internationally.
So you’re telling me this is why I don’t have stiletto long lashes!? I’ve been hoodwinked! Oh boy is Maybelline getting a strongly worded letter from me. Oh boy, are they ever.