Why?

We’re all consumers. In fact, we’re megaconsumers compared to ourselves some 10 years ago and are nowhere close to ourselves in just a half-decade from now. Next time you, while having your beer in a good company, are about to start a conversation along the lines of ‘my old <insert your most favourite brand name> is well worth two of your <insert a lesser favourite brand name>’, have another sip before and think what is that that’s causing you to say so. Is it your personal experience or is it someone else’s or maybe your TV commercial made you think so? Recently in Australia’s media there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle which was caused by the two biggies of the Telecom market - Optus and Telstra. The thing is - Optus released an ad with two numbers alongside each other - 98.5% Vs 99.3%.

Long story short, the supreme court ruled to stop the campaign due to its misleading content. As one might have thought by glancing at the map of Australia with the two figures in it, it’s not actually comparing the network coverage of the two rivaling companies; instead these percentages were meant to compare the country’s population covered by each of these network.

I took the liberty of slightly altering the pic while (as I convinced myself to believe) keeping the idea intact.

Hmmm… Okay, I failed the ‘keep the idea intact’ part.

This is the wild world of comparative advertising. Where the stakes are high and brands are allowed to openly compare themselves against their competitors’ products. Funnily enough, my quick research showed that this is allowed pretty much everywhere across the globe these days and the idea itself has quite a history - the first recorded case was in the US of A in 1910 and pretty much every big brand there is and was has had an go at their rivals through their ads - Mac and PC, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Microsoft and Google, Teradata and Oracle. Openly.

Comparative advertising is an uncommon technique, mainly because of the inherent risk of being sued, due to the fact that in many countries there is no strict legislation defining what’s allowed and where’s that line that should not be crossed - for instance, Russia’s and Australia’s laws on the matter are quite vague. And there’s simply no guarantee that your ad stating that ‘...our pillows are 5% softer than the PillowCo ones’ will work just because your competitor gets their brand attention figures upped as well. Be damned those swords that cut both ways.

-Igor-