Good for Great Britain, For Defending Truth In Advertising

I am in agreement that advertisements should be truthful and not misleading. It is nice to see Britain's ASA ban one of Apple's misleading ads touting the speed of the iPhone 3G. In the end though, consumers need to take responsibility for their purchases. Especially with large purchases like the iPhone, one would expect people to do a little bit of research prior to shelling out a few hundred dollars simply based on adds showing obviously inaccurate speeds. Granted that may be a little too much to expect in today's instant gratification society, but it certainly isn't too much to ask for, right?

In follow up to my first post, I wanted to bring up one more thought. It would be great for consumers if we were ever to get to the point where all advertisements could be taken at face value as being truthful and honest. In order for this to happen, it most likely needs to equate to higher profits or at least some positive for the companies doing the advertising. I think if companies took the initiative to put out truthful ads, the consumer would take notice and be more likely to buy products from those companies. In the long run and even in the short term it could be a win-win situation.

The issue of truth in advertising is an important one. Afterall, in the United States alone advertising is a $150+ billion dollar industry and one that permeates many aspects of our modern world. For example, advertising is critically important to mass media and the still burgeoning economy of the Web. If we are willing to dismiss ads as pure lies then advertising loses much of its inherent value.

Taking some recent developments into consideration, Apple's iPhone ads represent something of a special case when.

There have been a number of lawsuits brought against Apple related to the iPhone. One of the pending lawsuits concerns the advertised speed of the 3G iPhone when compared to the actual experience of using the device. Earlier this week details of Apple's rebuttal of that complaint hit the web. That document (available online) includes the following paragraph:

> Plaintiff's claims, and those of the purported class, are barred by the fact that the alleged deceptive statements were such that no reasonable person in Plaintiff's position could have reasonably relied on or misunderstood Apple's statements as claims of fact.

It's important to note that the basis of the claim is not the video from featured in the ad but the statement "twice as fast for half the price", which Apple unveiled with the 3G iPhone and used frequently for the first few months after the release of the device. That short statement is actually two claims: Firstly that the retail price of the 3G iPhone is half that of the previous model, and secondly that the speed is twice as fast as the first generation iPhone. It is easy to objectively assess the first of those two claims. The 3G iPhone is in fact available at half the cost of the original iPhone. That leaves the latter claim, 'twice as fast'.

Literally from the moment the 3G iPhone was introduced Apple has insisted that the performance of the iPhone running on ATT's 3G network is twice as fast as the model it replaces running on ATT's older EDGE network. That was precisely the claim made by Steve Jobs when he introduced the device to a capacity crowd in his keynote at Apple's developer conference in June (WWDC 2008). Since then the claim has been asserted countless times by Apple Inc. and picked up and repeated by any number of news agencies and media outlets.

Now Apple is asking a judge to accept that 'no reasonable person...could have reasonably relied on or misunderstood Apple's statements as claims of fact.' This is an absurd statement when considering the context.

It's important to recognize that this is not just an ad we're talking about. These are statements made by Apple Inc. to a gathering of its developers, people who must base business decisions on just this sort of information; This is information that investors might use as the basis of a decision to buy or sell stock in the company; This is information a consumer might use to make the decision about whether or not to spend as much as $299.00 for a 3G iPhone and commit to the required 2 year service contract. (The cost for existing iPhone customers, who might base a decision to upgrade to the new device from the older model based on the twice as fast claim, are substantially greater.)