Some forms of deceptive advertising 

 

Deceptive advertising uses fillers primarily to make consumers think they are purchasing something more valuable than it actually is, by bulking up its size without keeping its quality consistent.

 

 

A primary example of such deceptive advertising is in pet food, as fillers are often used in the food in order to simply bulk up the size of the pellet and the overall amount of food being produced at a lowered cost to the manufacturer. Non-nutrient ingredients are often included in animal food as filler, simply in order to increase the food size, so that consumer perception of the food and its value will similarly increase.

 

 

Such non-nutrient ingredients are not entirely without value, of course, as they do add fiber to the food, which some pet dietitians believe is important for the pet's health. But other dietitians have argued in the opposite, that most filler is actually low-grade fiber that does nothing to help with the overall nutrition of the food, and actually can hurt the animal more than it can help.

 

 

The use of filler often does not correlate to false claims, either. A pet food company might still be able to claim that a given pet food product does, actually, contain certain components, without that claim being diminished by the presence of filler in the food. As long as the pet food company does not, for instance, say that certain things are included in the pet food that are not really there, or say that there is a certain ratio of components which is false, thanks to the filler, then the company will have made no false claims. This is part of the reason why filler is actually a dangerous element for the consumer attempting to see past deceptive advertising.

 

 

Over-sized packaging is something of the inverse of filler, but it is a similar form of deceptive advertising. Instead of bulking up the product itself with unnecessary, non-beneficial components, the packaging is simply bulked up, as a simulation of the presence of filler. Imagine that, instead of a dog food bag being primarily filled with pellets, 75% of which are filler, you instead put into the dog bag only those parts of the pellets which are clearly and inarguably good for the dog.

 

 

You would then have to pad out the size of the bag in order to convince the consumer that he or she is still buying a valuable amount of product, as distilling the actual healthful elements of dog food would likely lead to a significantly reduced overall product size. Over-sized packaging is deceptive advertising based on this principle, and it makes the implicit false claim that there is more product within the packaging than there would appear to be.

Of late, there has been one example of this kind of false advertisement that stands out, not least because it is clear cut. In the computer technologies industry, the external hard drive has been growing in prominence as a desirable product with every passing year. The market for such external hard drives, coupled with the market for internal hard drives, has led to a significant growth in the profitability of hard drive sales.

But the terms used to describe hard drives are often very technical, and some consumers do not have the knowledge base necessary to be able to sort out the nature of such descriptions. Primarily, false advertisement based on manipulation of standards in the world of hard drives is focused on manipulating consumers’ understanding of the terms used to describe the space on any given hard drive.

Most consumers will understand the basic prefixes attached to “-byte” in order to describe hard drive space. A megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes, and a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes, or 1,000 megabytes, or so the average consumer would believe. Many hard drive manufacturers use this figure, then, in their claims about the size of a given hard drive.

But the truth is that most operating systems and software define megabytes and gigabytes differently, with a gigabyte being 1,073,742,824 bytes, instead of the flat one billion described by hard drive manufacturers. The one billion bytes advertised by hard drive manufacturers is significantly less than a full, actual gigabyte as treated by computers.

This is false advertisement, then, as hard drive manufacturers are simply applying a different definition to their claims of size on the hard drives than the practical definition applied by computers and software themselves. Consumers are not getting as much space from the product as they are being led to believe.

Accusations of false advertisement against these manufacturers were actually supported in two different class action lawsuits against two different manufacturers, in or around 2005 and 2006. But despite the success of these lawsuits, the manufacturers continue to use such terms in their advertisements. The claims of fraud were not strong enough to dissuade manufacturers from false advertising through manipulation of standards.

One of the other ways in which advertisers use manipulations of standards is actually in a slightly more gray area; in this area, the practice does not as clearly fall into the domain of fraud or false advertising. Many products employ claims of certain terms, such as “organic.” These claims often do not have common definitions between them; one manufacturer will define the term one way, and another will define it an entirely different way.