This morning I heard a radio ad with Charles Osgood pushing some antioxidant supplement product and one key phrase was "...emerging research suggests...." This indicates to me that apparently the studies are not complete or conclusive, but the company will use them to promote the product anyway.
That reminds me of the current Back to the Future ads for DirecTV with Christopher Lloyd saying something along the lines of "Soon DirecTV will have three times the HD capacity of cable." So they don't have it yet and they're not even saying when they'll have it (beyond the vague "soon"), but they're promoting it nonetheless. Thus when the ad airs I hear: We don't actually offer this, but buy our product as is and maybe we'll get around to it at some point in your area. For all I know their current capacity could even be less than cable. I can see advertising a product (or feature) which has a specific release date (or geographical area of availability), but I don't think saying "soon" is good enough to qualify as a valid selling point.
Likewise, studies (even completed ones) that only "suggest" or "may indicate" some specific conclusion are virtually worthless. Especially if there happens to be, say, ten studies indicating one correlation between factors and maybe seven indicating no correlation (or significantly different ones). In that case advertising for products on either side of the issue could still say "studies suggest" (or similar phrasing) and not be subject to accusations of outright false claims.
2 days ago
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