Comment by pengaru
3 years ago
I'm not defending this kind of shit at all, but when it comes to marketing/advertising imagery everything is staged and dolled up - and it's nothing new.
Back in the 90s my older sister left college a talented artist and promptly found the only real paying work available to her in the advertising industry. Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.
I think this is a stretch: consumers understand that advertisements for food do not literally represent the material conditions of what they get at Burger King (compare, for example, any number of ridiculous advertisements where the food flies around in front of the camera).
This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
New idea: open a pop-up cafe near a law school called "Material Statement of Fact." Run a bunch of advertisements with silly pictures (food flying in the air, tootpicks holding in the lettucs, etc.). Each meal is served exactly as absurd as it is pictured.
I think it'd be a lot of fun for like 2 days.
Don’t forget daily live performances by whatever band’s music is in the background of the ads! Otherwise it could possibly be construed as false advertising, after all.
>This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
Everyone knows you can't tow the space shuttle with a Tacoma in any reasonable sense and that only a very skilled driver spending a day taking a crack at it can get a Land Rover up a ski hill in an elegant way.
That won't stop people from playing dumb in order to prop up some farcical point they tried making online and got called out on.
> Everyone knows you can't tow the space shuttle with a Tacoma in any reasonable sense and that only a very skilled driver spending a day taking a crack at it can get a Land Rover up a ski hill in an elegant way.
As someone who lives on a dirt road surrounded by airbnb's near a national park seeing lots of tourist traffic, I think you have an extremely flawed understanding of what "everyone knows" WRT their vehicle's capabilities.
Right! And emphasis on playing dumb: the GP’s argument requires the courts to not understand the difference, when they clearly do.
> Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.
McDonalds Canada has published a behind the scenes of them doing a photoshoot for a burger[0] then compared it to the real thing. It's interesting seeing the tricks you mention involved (one you didn't mention but they do, is the patty is frozen and only the edges seared so it stays thicker).
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8
However, there is literally a point where this becomes fraud and as a publicly traded company Tesla has to be aware of where that line is drawn.
I mean heck just look at what happened to Nikola. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-ele...
Nobody dies because a burger is flatter or because some grapes are matte.
No, but people develop ailments like obesity and heart disease from eating too much fast food.
One could argue broadcasting such misrepresentations contributes to the incidence of their excessive consumption related ailments. Obesity and heart disease can resemble slow death. Autopilot/FSD just does it faster.
> everything is staged and dolled up
Dolled up, yes. Staged as in, "Portrayed in the best light?" Yes. But staged as in "As fake as the Apollo 11 moon landing?" No.
McDonald's Canada did an entire video showing how they shoot their food. They're not allowed to fake it, but what they can do is put forty patties on the grill and choose the nicest two to put in the ad. They can take a basket of heads of lettuce and pick the perfect piece. They can carefully layer the food on the bun with a slight setback to give the illusion that it's taller via perspective, but they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7xnjBoJHzE
I met a specialty food photographer once. He had food dyes and a tackle box full of glass beads, he could make a fake cup of coffee look like a hot cup of coffee, but he was clear that he did that when shooting an ad for something else, e.g. If it's the cup being sold, not the coffee.
Not everything in advertising is an outright fraud, although everything in advertising is staged as well as possible, just as you say.
And "as well as possible" can be really, really well when you have deep pockets.
> they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is
Anyone that's eaten a big mac and seen a commercial for one knows they clearly do lie about how tall the food is.
I presume what you meant here is that they're not supposed to lie about how tall the food is. Clearly the can and do. Actual McDonalds hamburgers are the saddest looking flat soggy salt biscuits ever to be called a hamburger. Their commercials show nothing of the sort, get real.
Perhaps McDonalds lies to you in your jurisdiction, but no, I have never seen an ad where they claim that their hamburgers are so-and-so many millimetres tall. I have seen plenty of claims from them about things like the uncooked weight of their burgers, and the fine print always clarifies that cooking reduces the weight.
Perhaps you could share with me the lies McDonalds has told you and everyone else about their food? I mean, sure, it sucks. But the video I linked to above explains exactly why and how the food in the ads looks better than the food they sell you.
Other than that, where are the lies?
It's truly bizarre that Musk stans are resorting to calling out McDs to try and defend Tesla's blatant fraud.
But I can tell you right now that McDs is not lying about what a BigMac can look like, because I have eaten a Bic Mac, and other McDs burgers, that looked just like they were from a commercial. Food has natural variability; how the final burger appears depends on the ingredients and the preparation, and some McDs locations like the ones near me do a better job of storing their buns and assembling their burgers than others.
The analogy here is not a burger is made to look better with toothpicks, but that the burger vendor doesn't mention that it has a small chance of containing a deadly poison.