Asbestos-Free Cereal - TV Tropes

"The best part of this As Seen On TV item is the commercial itself, which expresses the product's versatility, which allows it to be used on either a gas or electric stove top — you know, like pretty much every other pot in existence."

• 7Up once advertised "5 all-natural ingredients" for about a month. These five natural ingredients included high fructose corn syrup and natural flavors.
• Heinz advertises that its vinegars are "not made from petroleum." This isn't as absurd as it first appears: petroleum can be used to artificially make some of the ingredients of vinegar. In fact, there is no legal requirement to list ingredient SOURCES which is one reason Heinz advertises that its are natural. That said, the resulting ingredients are effectively the same either way as neither method of obtaining the alcohol used to distill the vinegar results in the product including petroleum. But most people wouldn't actually know that.
• McDonald's emphasizes its "hand-picked Arabica coffee beans" in its McCafe advertisements. Arabica is usually considered a better product than Robusta,^note  but the fact is that almost all coffee beans are hand-picked, due to the temperamental nature of the coffee plant making mechanization very difficult. And most coffee beans are Arabica, anyway.
• Maxwell House did this same "100% hand-picked Arabica" schtick long before McDonald's thought of it, and quite a few brands in the US quickly followed suit. Folger's, significantly, does not make any such claims, mostly because their product does in fact contain a large percentage of Robusta beans. This stems from a price war in the '60s and '70s that, among other things, had companies moving to using only cheaper, harsher tasting Robusta beans. The practice had nearly killed the coffee market by the early 1980s.
• Related to the whole wheat example: Quaker has proudly advertised that all its hot oatmeals are whole-grain oats — including the instant oatmeals with flavoring. Neat trick.
• Some companies market Himalayan salt as non-GMO, even though sodium chloride with (or without) impurities cannot be genetically modified because there's no genetic material to modify. Also, it's actually mined in Pakistan (and there are similar coloured salt deposits in other parts of the world, too).
• Spam - yes the hyper-processed tinned ham - has a variation with "Real HORMEL® Bacon." Not only is HORMEL just the brand that makes spam, but it implies the existence of "Fake HORMEL® Bacon."
• Yet another salt example: In Theodore Gray's book Molecules, there is a discussion about the definition of "organic". There are some images of salt advertised as "organic". His caption: "Organic salt? Seriously?"
• Numerous chain restaurants (including Chipotle) boast about using only "real ingredients," as if their competitors use imaginary ingredients.
• Similarly, lots of restaurant chains like to brag that their chicken, beef, and pork are raised without hormones or antibiotics, as if they're going above and beyond when, in Canada and the United States, hormone use is outright illegal in chicken and pork and antibiotic usage is very strictly regulated so that meat containing antibiotic residues can't be sold. In other words, they're basically bragging that they've met the minimum, legally-allowed standard of food quality.
  • Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! uncovers this and other terms used by the food industry, down to using them to promote the chicken restaurant Morgan Spurlock created to showcase the ugly truths:
• Organic Valley brand milk advertises that its milk contains, among other things, no toxic pesticides. The commercials do not seem to be running this way for humor value, either.
• "Plant-based" is quickly overtaking "gluten-free" as the big trendy —and often meaningless— marketing buzzword.
  • DudeWipes brand sanitary cloths proudly boast that they're made from "100% plant-based fibers", apparently in case someone out there was unaware that a great many textiles and all paper products have always been "plant-based" to begin with, and was worried that buying these meant they'd be wiping their arse with polyester.
  • Many frozen pizza brands brag about their "plant-based" cauliflower crusts, as though traditional pizza crusts have always been made from pressed ham (for those who are slow on the uptake, bread is usually made from grains and grains are, indeed, also plants).
  • Numerous alternative natural sweeteners like coconut sugar have also gotten into the "plant-based" game, which makes the odd insinuation that sugar beets and cane are somehow not plants (to be sure, it's easy to synthesize sucrose, a.k.a. table sugar, in a laboratory, but it's still far, far cheaper and more efficient to just extract it from natural sources). The only real difference between these "healthy" forms is whether they retain any of the extra nutrients that are processed out of refined white sugar, but chemically speaking, sucrose is sucrose, no matter where you get it from.
  • Reign energy drinks also run ads touting their "plant-based caffeine", even though, just like with sugar, it's not worth the trouble of synthesizing when caffeine is a very common food additive abundantly extracted from decaffeinated coffee and tea (both of which are plants). And, just like with sugar, caffeine doesn't become "healthier" for you just because it wasn't made in a laboratory.
• Camel once advertised their cigarettes as doctors' choice – "More doctors smoke Camels". Obviously, the implication was that doctors thought Camel was healthier, or that doctors as a rule live healthier lifestyles (that is definitely not always the case, and many did partake in the bad habit of smoking). The survey cited may as well have mentioned "More computer programmers smoke Camels". Even with that considered, Camel's own study, asking docs what their "favorite cigarette" or the "cigarette they had in their pocket", was conducted at a symposium with Camel as a sponsor, and many of the doctors had free Camel cigarettes from the very symposium in their pocket at the time. Many of the "doctors" in the actual ads were just models.

• In The New '10s, it became quite a common selling point to advertise a product as "gluten-free," thanks to a string of fad diets at the time that suggested reducing or eliminating it. Gluten is a protein found in certain species of grains, such as wheat, rye, and barley. While there are some gluten-free products made for people sensitive to it, a lot of these products never had any gluten in them to begin with. While there is certainly an opportunistic advertising element to all of these examples, it's also a bit Truth In Television. To legally declare a product "gluten free" you have to do gluten testing, maintain separate production facilities, etc. Gluten contamination can occur before the product even exists — for instance, oats growing in a field where wheat was once planted.
  • Wegman's Cola, the generic version of Coke sold at the (rather upscale) Wegman's supermarket chain in the US Mid-Atlantic region and Northeast, is marketed on the label as "Gluten free", "Lactose free", and "Vegan". So it has no wheat, milk, or other animal product. ^note 
  • Several brands of peanut butter also promote themselves as being "vegan." If you're asking yourself whether there are a lot of animal byproduct peanut butters on the market, well, no. ^note  These products can be marketed as "organic", and have been in the past, but not everyone knows or trusts that word.
  • There's at least one type of white cooking wine that advertises itself as "Gluten free" but Fridge Logic kicks in when you realize that wine is made out of grapes, so there is never gluten in it. Even rice wine, which is made of "glutinous rice" is gluten free, due to an odd language quirk. ^explanation
  • This also goes for non-flavored liquors such that label themselves "gluten-free." Gluten is a protein that is present in most grains that liquors such as whiskey, gin and some vodkas are made from, but gluten doesn't make it through the distillation process. Rum, tequila and brandy are never distilled from any grains by definition, so a gluten-free label on any of those is pretty much a secret gullibility test for the consumer. ^{Why non-flavored?}
  • Another joiner on this particular bandwagon is Santa Cruz Organic Peanut Butter, which is 100% made from peanuts and has the label highlighting that it is "gluten free". Even brands of peanut butter that aren't 100% peanuts generally don't use gluten-containing products.
  • A brand of cornflakes has started advertising itself as "same taste, gluten-free!" Except there's no measurable amount of gluten in corn (Zea mais) flakes. So if the new, improved, possibly-certified cereal tasted different, that would be a reason to worry. Because, you see, it would not be the same, already-gluten-free cereal anymore. This same line of logic extends to popcorn advertised as "gluten-free," which are sometimes made from the same strain of corn as corn flakes used in cereal.
  • A 2018 series of adverts for Herbal Essences shampoo commercial proudly proclaimed◊ their shampoo to be 100% gluten-free. Even aside from the fact that of course it would be, gluten doesn't harm people with a sensitivity to it or coeliac disease unless it's ingested. (And if you're eating your shampoo, you're going to have bigger problems than the gluten anyway.)
  • Gluten free pizza. In and of itself, understandable (as there are people with gluten sensitivities). But the fine print: "Not suitable for individuals with celiac disease." Which is the main reason someone would avoid gluten to begin with! That's like selling insulin and saying it's not suitable for anyone with diabetes.
• A Scandinavian cookie brand boasts that their cookies, which are light brown like most cookies, are "free of artificial coloring." A scientist interviewed in the newspaper noted that this is nothing special, since for the most part, cookies aren't blue.^note 
• The anti-GMO movement is so popular now that some manufacturers put non-GM labels on things like salt, water◊, and baking soda◊. Since DNA is only found in living organisms, it's impossible to genetically modify salt, water or baking soda because they don't have any genes to modify in the first place.
• There was a bit of a scandal in the Netherlands some years ago when chupa chup lollies came on the market and made a big point about 'being healthy' (on account of the fruit-juice in it). Of course they aren't healthy: they're full of sugar, and the fruit is way too processed to have any nutritional value. They were laughed off the market.
• Skippy Peanut Butter used to advertise itself as "cholesterol free," which is a true claim... since no brand of peanut butter has cholesterol. (Cholesterol is strictly from animal products, which generally don't go into peanut butter.)
• The label on bottled mineral waters, such as Hydr8, boast that it's completely free of sugar, calories and colouring. Of course, this is true of water in general.
• Jell-O sugar-free instant pudding mixes also boast that they are "fat free". All instant pudding mixes are fat free, they're just sugar, cornstarch, flavorings, colors and preservatives. The fat content depends on the milk you're using.
• Advertising meat as growth-hormone free is meant to appeal to the "natural foods" crowd. However, the use of growth hormones and anabolic steroids in cattle and poultry-rearing have been banned since the 1950s, at least in the U.S., though it's still a possibility when dealing with imports and outsourcing.
• Advertising preservative-free frozen vegetables in countries where adding preservatives to frozen products is banned. Hey, our product is legal!
• There's a photo going around of a bunch of seedless watermelons being labeled "Boneless"; obviously, since watermelon is a fruit, it doesn't have bones. A reply theorizes the possible reason why they're labeled such: an associate ran out of "Seedless" stickers to use, with the store only having "Boneless" stickers to work with.

  "Fuck it. Seeds are like bones, right?"

  • Alternatively, English could have been a second language for the person sticking the labels. There are languages that have similar or even the same word for "seed" and "bone", and a native speaker of one of these languages could have been clueless about the difference.
• Some bicycle drinking bottles made of soft plastic are advertised as being free from Bisphenol A (BPA). The thing is that BPA is not used for soft plastics, but for polycarbonate. And of course BPA is not the only harmful substance that plastics could release into water.
• After people discovered (in the midst of a wave of popularity, no less) that Stanley tumblers had lead sealed inside, competing brands such as Hydro Flask and Owala quickly rushed in to promote themselves as lead-free.

• Trademarked products: Trademarks only protect the name, slogan, and logo of products or features, not the designs, ingredients, etc. themselves. Generic or identical products may exist, and any relevant patents or trade secrets may have already expired or leaked long ago, yet brands may rely on the name to trick you into thinking theirs is the only.
  • Certs is advertised as the only breath freshener with Retsyn. Retsyn is a combination of ingredients which is made by Certs under the trademarked name "Retsyn," so nobody else is allowed to use that name even if they use the same ingredients.
  • Ditto with Trident Xtra-Care gum, which advertises calcium-based Recaldent to "remineralize" teeth. (Recaldent, of course, is just a combination of the prefix "re-", the word "calcium", and the French "dent", meaning tooth.)
  • "Only Birdseye peas have Birdseye's Vitamins In Peas guarantee!" Yes, because you’re hardly going to give that marketing gimmick to your competitors, are you? Flash freezing any vegetable locks in its vitamins for a longer period than it would have when fresh. All their competitors do this, they just can't refer to the process with Birdseye's trademark.
  • Several brands of gasoline have contained trademarked additives over the years, such as Shell's "Platformate" or Chevron's "Techroline" (later "Techron"). As with Retsyn in Certs, no other gasoline could claim to have these additives, even if they contained additives that were chemically identical. Chevron in particular has occasionally shown posters of the effects of non-Techron gasoline years after their patent expired, with the implication that only their original somehow will prevent buildup of gunk on your pistons.
  • Sega's early '90s ads notoriously claimed the Genesis was superior to the Super Nintendo because it had "Blast Processing" while being conspicuously vague on what Blast Processing even was, leading many to assume it was just some made-up buzzword to make the Genesis sound cooler. It was later confirmed to refer to the Genesis' Yamaha VDP graphics processor, which had a somewhat faster DMA speed, but no Genesis games ever got to a speed that high, meaning Sega was advertising something they technically had but never actually used.
  • Merriam-Webster makes a big deal about how only their dictionaries are the true heir to Webster's original dictionaries, while anyone can make an updated version of the originals, whose copyrights have long expired. However, it's not like the alternatives are bad dictionaries.
  • GM used to make a big deal about being the only brand with OnStar, which is GM's own brand of... actually, a number of unrelated features and services. Some of which were, admittedly, great to have and not available on competing vehicles, like remote stolen-car tracking and automatically contacting emergency services in the event of an accident (handy if your cell phone is out of battery), but they also used the brand for things like hands-free calling and GPS, which were being adopted as optional features by pretty much every other company around the same time.
  • Apple used to specifically advertise its computers as using "AirPort" wireless Internet – which is Wi-Fi. Apple also sold Wi-Fi routers with the AirPort moniker, which could potentially fool a person into thinking that iBooks, PowerBooks, and later MacBooks only worked with these routers, though that was never the case.
• "Patented," "proprietary," or "specialized" used as a selling point. A design being patented doesn't mean it's superior to older designs. It just means it was significantly different enough to convince a nation's patent office to issue them a patent, and that they paid the appropriate fees to have a legal monopoly over their product for 20 years in most jurisdictions (though some products, such as medical devices in the US, are eligible for extensions of those terms in some jurisdictions). When the patents eventually expire (likely within your lifetime), you will then see if the designs were truly superior, since other manufacturers will milk the heck out of them. Proprietary, nonstandard, or unique parts, such as charging ports, also aren't necessarily better – it just means that you either have to buy through the company or buy through anyone the company was generous enough to license the patent to, meaning you'll pay more for parts. Products like desktop computers, bicycles, etc., have long used industry standards. Deviating from these standards might make for smaller products, or unique products, but not necessarily better products, and certainly not cheaper ones to own.
  • Brompton's bicycles claim to have over X amount of specialized parts on every bicycle (usually in the triple digits). Brompton also patented each part in a way that no other company can make parts that will fit on a Brompton until each and every patent expires in under 20 years... perhaps after you have a new bike with newer, also patented designs. What this means is that Brompton has a monopoly on its parts. If your Brompton needs even the slightest bit of maintenance or repair, be prepared to pay through the nose because Brompton can charge any price it wants. (By contrast, there is a standard on most bicycle parts that frequently need repair, such as brakes and inner tubes, that nearly all other bicycle manufacturers follow, including those of higher quality than Brompton's.)
• Endorsements by organizations that aren't particularly special: whether the organization is required to register your product (Library of Congress for major book releases), you yourself registered it (not far removed from "We're on Facebook!"), or the organization is irrelevant to the industry
  • Many "buy a star" services proudly proclaim that your star names are registered at the US Copyright Office, meaning they publish a master list with the office, likely sitting in the Library of Congress. But such a registration isn't taken seriously by professional astronomers – the standard organization for that is the IAU (International Astronomical Union).
  • Sucrets once advertised that for sore throats, their product is listed in the Physician's Desk Reference. Yes, it is. Because the Physician's Desk Reference is a list of every medication in existence. "Listed" is not the same thing as "endorsed."
  • In the 1990s, Macleans toothpaste was advertised in Australia as "the only toothpaste with the Australian Dental Association's seal of approval". However, as Australian consumer magazine Choice pointed out, this was only because at the time, Macleans was the only toothpaste that had bothered to apply for the seal. (Other brands of toothpaste such as Colgate have since applied for and received the ADA's seal as well.)
• Richard Feynman's spotted-in-the-wild examples were frying oil that doesn't soak into things when you fry them (as he explains, as long as the temperature is right, no oil soaks, otherwise any does) and warm pants that don't only warm you up, they also isolate! This particular manufacturer, though, changed his commercials when advised that pants may isolate, but they don't generate heat (except maybe electric pants).
• Ford Motor Company advertises its turbocharged vehicles as "eco-boost," and touts the fact that their turbos boost both power and fuel efficiency. This is true, however, all turbochargers improve fuel efficiency, because they change how the engine takes in gasoline, in such a way that makes it more efficient.
• Mazda put out a Dualvertisement with The Lorax for their CX-5 SUV, advertising it as the only SUV to receive the "Truffula Tree certified seal of approval." The ad also promotes the car as "Truffula Tree friendly." Truffula Trees, of course, don't exist outside of The Lorax, and the ad doesn't make any claim about the impact the SUV has on real trees (despite mildly improved fuel efficiency, the CX-5 still has substantial carbon emissions).

• Liberty Mutual loves to brag that they "customize your car insurance, so you only pay for what you need"... which is exactly what every single insurance company does when you sign up for a policy. And a big part of any insurance's customization is based on actuarial thinking (stereotypes with statistical truth, such as young male drivers being more aggressive than their female or older counterparts).
• Nutella:
  • Nutella's main sales-argument is 'gives you energy'. Refined sugar tends to do that. If you're using Nutella on a sandwich, it gives you maybe more than a quarter of all your energy in the day, maybe more than half! The reason for this advertising? Nutella was marketed as "gives you energy" in post-World War II Italy, where its dense calorie content was helpful for giving Italian children a cheap, quick rush of energy with their breakfast. In America? Not so much.
  • Sugar is also the main ingredient in many 'energy-drinks', with the caffeine and taurine more of an afterthought. Caffeine does give you more energy in the sense that it stimulates your nervous system and makes you feel energized, but it provides no physical energy for your muscles.
  • In the US, they claim that being made with "hazelnuts, skim milk, and a hint of cocoa" mean it's a great snack for your kids, and that it can be put on healthy foods to make them taste better. Problem is, they leave out the large amount of sugar, and that you'd probably be better off using peanut or hazelnut butter on your whole-grain toast.
  • In an inversion of this type of claim, free UK newspaper Metro once published a letter from a reader complaining that processed foods "have no energy" (presumably using "energy" in some unspecified mystical-nonsense way, or referring to the fact that processed foods tend to make you feel lethargic in the long run, rather than in the scientific sense of "that which enables work to be done"). The following day, it printed another letter, replying that the real problem is that processed foods have far too much energy ("calories" are energy in the same way that decibels are sound), and that's why there's an obesity crisis.
• OANN's Graham Ledger likes to sign off every one of his newscasts by reminding people that it's archived in the Library of Congress. This is true for nearly any creative work published in America, pretty much all books (except small vanity prints), and even social media, up to and including all of Twitter at one point. Though curiously enough, Ledger's own show is not archived in the Library.
• Bell Canada advertises their high-speed Internet as "perfect for laptops". Well, it really doesn't matter what form of computer you're using, but sometimes an included Wi-Fi router does come in handy.
• Many Role Playing Games (especially in the 16-bit era) had advertisements or box blurbs boasting "Over XX hours of gameplay!" Depending on the game, a good number of these "XX hours" would be devoted to Level Grinding or walking from place to place.
• Battery ads are also guilty of this.
  • Companies advertising that their alkaline batteries last two to four times longer than other brands of battery. But they always fail to point out the type of battery they are comparing to is cheaper zinc–carbon batteries rather than similarly priced alkaline ones. If compared against similar alkaline batteries, there would be next to no difference in length of use. Duracell is a major offender with this, most notably with the original "Duracell Bunny" commercial from the 1970s.
  • Eveready^note  created the Energizer Bunny campaign as a direct shot against Duracell. Duracell did successfully sue Eveready, though, over their "Nothing Lasts Longer" claim in the Energizer ads^note . Subsequently, the fictional competitor "Supervolt" was created as a Brand X parody of Duracell, still implying that Energizer can outlast their alkaline rivals.
• The Football Manager series has turned its promotion of the yearly updates by claiming that the game has hundreds of changes. Football Manager 2014 is claimed to have over 1000. Of course, these changes include every single minor bug fix, change in UI, and any scrap of change, even if the change is for the worse.
• An advertisement for a device amplifying one's hearing starts out by cheerfully saying "Ever wish you had SONIC HEARING?!" 'Sonic' is, by definition, a part of hearing – equivalent to mentioning "optical vision" or "tactile touch."
• In 2011, the Belgian cable company Telenet has been advertising its internet via the cable as "Surf at the speed of light!" Virtually all internet traffic uses fibre-optic connection at some point in the process, which moves at the speed of light. The only thing that improves download speeds is how many signals can be sent at the same time over the same connection before Demand Overload hits.
• When Wendy's was going through a major marketing overhaul, aside from "better quality ingredients" (such as red onions instead of white, which is more personal taste than anything), they began to advertise their French fries as "natural cut". This was an odd but enticing phrase, especially since they were now also seasoned with sea salt and cooked (not "fried") in different oil. After poking and prodding, it turns out that "natural cut" simply means "the skins are still on when we cut them". Also, the claim about their fries being seasoned with sea salt clearly tries make the salt they use sound more exotic. While most table salt is mined from deposits in the ground, sea salt isn't exactly hard to come by, and there's a chance it's the exact same salt in the shakers.
• The Atari Jaguar was boasted as "The first 64-bit console", with the tag line "Do the math!" This was because it had two 32-bit processors, which does in fact "math up" to 64 bits, but that's not how bit-counting works. It doesn't help either that it gave the console a unique architecture from a developer's standpoint, making it very difficult to program games for and causing most games on it to not even come close to utilizing the system's power and leaving them on the level of 16-bit era games at best. This blatant lie coupled with the system's sub-par performance even compared to other 32-bit systems made it the last console Atari would make. Adding insult to injury, although the Nintendo 64 happily had a 64-bit graphics processor,^note  most consoles from that point forward focused on overall specs and iteration numbers, as well as gameplay footage to demonstrate graphics, rather than just the main processor's maximum word size.
  • Something similar to the Atari Jaguar's marketing would happen with the PC Engine when it was released in North America as the TurboGrafx-16 and proudly boasted the console as having 16 bits, despite only the GPU being 16-bit and the CPU was only 8-bit. This would eventually be taken advantage of by Sega, internationally marketing the Sega Genesis as being the first true 16-bit console and dismissing the TurboGrafx-16.
• History Repeats with Google Stadia, where they loved to brag about how it had more teraflops than all their competition combined and about their powerful data centers. Teraflops are a real thing and Google's data centers are no doubt overwhelmingly powerful, but what does it matter how terafloppy their data centers are when they didn't use it: the console only ever got five exclusive games and none of those games made use of its alleged power in any way, none of their other games used its power to be more impressive than they were on the rival consoles, Stadia was actually less impressive than their competitors as its games ran at upscaled 720p and essentially on medium-quality settings, and their teraflops couldn't do anything to address drops in quality caused by the internet connection the games were being streamed over. Gamers weren't impressed, and the service limped in circles for 4 years before being unceremoniously discontinued.
• As recorded in a The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said calendar, a grocery store advertised "golden, ripe, boneless bananas." Maybe they were Hoosier Hotshots fans?
• It is a very common practice for internet service providers to use megabits when referring to data transmission rates instead of megabytes, which lowers the speed by a factor of eight — 50 megabits per second is only a little more than 6 megabytes per second. It is also common practice to specify when you are referring to bits or bytes. Cable One, before they renamed themselves to Sparklight, used to advertise a speed of "50 Megs" or "50 Megs per second" in its radio commercials.
• Kraft cheese advertises that it's made with "fresh milk". Given that cheese is milk that's gone bad, fresh milk isn't exactly an asset when making it.
• Among the many faux-artisanal trends adopted by fast food restaurants since the turn of the millennium, the most pointless was/is the marketing of burgers that proudly used Black Angus beef. Unlike other gimmicks such as chipotle sauce and ciabatta bread, this one doesn't require any new ingredients at all, because while the marketing makes it seem as if Angus is some exotic, special breed renowned for its exquisiteness, the truth is that it's the most common variety of beef cattle in the United States, and #2 in Western Europe. Similarly, restaurants touting Hass avocados or Madagascar vanilla are really just saying they use the most common variety on the market.
• Many fast-food joints, most notably Wendy's, will make a big to-do about "fresh, never frozen" meat in their marketing. Putting fresh meat in your home freezer will make a very noticeable difference in quality, since the process is slow and the water inside will form big ice crystals, rupturing cell walls and causing a lot of moisture to weep out upon thawing, giving you dry and less flavorful meat. Customers are meant to assume this is what restaurants who use frozen meat are doing, too, but that is false. Pre-frozen foods are always instantly flash-frozen using extreme cold, meaning that ice crystals don't have time to form and the meat thaws out with the same consistency and texture it had when fresh; anyone with a refined enough palate to tell the difference probably isn't eating fast food to begin with.
• One of the oldest examples comes from Lucky Strike cigarettes, whose packaging proudly bragged that "It's Toasted!" all the way back in 1917. All cigarette tobacco is toasted,^note  but consumers drew the conclusion that other brands somehow used untoasted tobacco, and this false assumption made Luckies the top-selling brand for decades.
• In mid-2016, Antarctica was declared the most LGBT-friendly continent. This probably has more to do with the nature of Antarctica (no permanent residents, no companies or corporations based in Antarctica), and the fact that there aren't any laws (either favorable or unfavorable towards the LGBT set) in Antarctica, just laws governing what other countries can and cannot do there (for example, no military installments) than anything else. It's literally true that Antarctica is more LGBT-friendly than any other continent...but kind of deceptively so. Though that might have been the point: not “advertising” Antarctica but showing how NON-friendly all those continents with people and societies on them were and encouraging them to do better than Antarctica.
• It's very common to see cheap projectors sold online with impressively high resolution mentioned in the product title, only for the detailed specs to reveal that this is the input resolution rather than the resolution it displays. So yes, the projector will happily accept a 1080p Full HD image... but it only has the hardware to project that 1080p image scaled down to 480p.
• In Britain in the late 1990s, several start-up ISPs (most notably Freeserve) offered "free" internet access — no contract, just dial their number. What they carefully omitted to mention is that it was free of subscription charges and contract obligations, not free of all charges; fees for online time were levied via the cost of the call (the pay-as-you-go model), and like most PAYG services, it was the most expensive way of doing it. One of their rivals advertised their (conventional) ISP services as "cheaper than free".
• One brand of folding bicycle was advertised as having 'extra large 20" wheels' (as compared with other folding bikes, which had ordinary 20" wheels). One problem with this is that there is no such bike wheel size as "extra large" — there is only "small" (up to 24") and "standard" (26" or 27").
• Cable and satellite companies comparing their broadband Internet speeds to DSL. Although DSL is much slower than what they're likely offering, what they don't tell you is, most residential homes aren't even going to be using DSL in the first place (and certainly almost no businesses would use it, either). Today's society is so Internet-dependent that DSL, while state-of-the-art late in The '90s or at the Turn of the Millennium, just doesn't cut it for most people now. The only people that are going to be using DSL are people who live in remote areas where cable and fiber Internet are not available, low-income households that can't afford to get anything faster (or else they would), or people (generally older) who use the Internet sparingly (i.e. people that either can't get broadband, or have no interest in it to begin with). So they're really comparing apples and oranges. The factual accuracy of such claims can vary, too. DSL technologies have also been improving, and VDSL2 can offer up to 300 megabits per second under ideal conditions. G.Fast can deliver speeds approaching a whopping gigabit per second, and the experimental 10G.Fast can deliver even more. Their main limitation is that they need a telephone line that is very short and made with good quality wiring, almost always requiring the provider to bring the fiber to a streetside cabinet or the basement of the building.
• Oftentimes, partway through the airing of a show's first season, the network will put out a press release trumpeting that the second season has already been greenlit. While this sounds good, it's mostly Trivially Obvious if you know anything about production schedules, especially for animated shows. Chances are pretty good that unless it's a limited series or the production has been a complete disaster, the crew probably started work on the second season well before the first started airing. If the show looked promising enough to air, the producers weren't going to have the cast and crew sit on their haunches for months on end until the first reviews and ratings finally started coming in.
• A law office claimed, "All our lawyers are juris doctors." A juris doctorate is a law degree — one of the two basic things required to practice law in most jurisdictions in the United States (the other being a law license). The advertisement was found to be in violation of the ethics rules because it misled potential clients into believing that the juris doctorate was something not all attorneys have, implying that the offending firm was unique in that regard.
• In 1997, UK sugar manufacturers Tate & Lyle ran an ad in which celebrity chef Gary Rhodes proudly proclaimed that he only used cane sugar in his cooking, specifically noting, "Not all sugar is made from sugar cane. In fact, Tate & Lyle are Britain's only cane sugar refiners." Two problems with that: 1) there's no appreciable difference between cane sugar and beet sugar, and 2) the reason other UK refiners, like Silver Spoon and Whitworths, use sugar beet is that it's actually grown in the UK, whereas sugar cane has to be grown in tropical countries (where it often takes up premium farmland).
• In 2015, PETA filed a class action lawsuit against Whole Foods accusing the latter of false claims surrounding animal welfare. The lawsuit was dismissed because Whole Foods' vague claims about humane meat, such as "great-tasting meat from healthy animals" and "raised right tastes right," were considered legal levels of puffery. Their boast that "no cages" were used to raise their broiler chickens was also deemed not misleading, but it was pointed out that most poultry suppliers don't use cages in the first place, so it's not unique to Whole Foods.
• Some data storage devices such as memory cards are advertised as "Full HD 1080p", which is pretty meaningless. They can, in fact, store any type of file on them as long as there's room, and a 1080p video could be only a few dozen megabytes if it's short enough. Ironically, nearly all of them are formatted in FAT32 (the only format that every OS natively supports), meaning they can only hold files that are less than 4GB each, so you probably couldn't put a whole HD movie on one no matter how big its total capacity is.
  • It turns out that this particular claim is true, but misleading. The claim doesn't actually relate to the capacity of the card at all. A card advertised as Full HD 1080p has to have a fast enough minimum read speed to play the video back without copying it off of the card first to your phone's internal storage, while one that doesn't claim this doesn't, though it may have a sufficient speed class to do so anyway (and probably does).
• In France, a series of ads for a chain of optician stores made during the COVID-19 Pandemic solely consists of a long description of the sanitary measures taken by the workers to make sure they don't contribute to spreading the disease to the customers, with no mention of the glasses they sell. Considering the chain is legally obliged to respect those sanitary measures, which are actually the same for every store of every kind in the country, that's actually unimpressive.
• HeadOn’s infamous ads (“Apply directly to the forehead!”) included the information that the product was “available without a prescription from retailers nationwide!” It’s true that many effective over-the-counter medications are available without a prescription... and so are most other things, like candles, which would be just as medically useless as the inert ingredients of HeadOn.
• This '90s advert for Persil washing-up liquid (dish soap) starring Robbie Coltrane: "Well, you see, Persil grips the grease, then holds it in the water so it can't get back on the plate." In other words, it does exactly the same thing as every other detergent in existence.
• Credit cards for people with poor credit will often tout the fact they report to the three credit bureaus to help you build up your credit score. Every credit card/line of credit reports to those same bureaus.
• Commercially-sold ammunition frequently highlights that they sell centerfire ammunition (meaning the primer is at the center of the base of the casing and is a separate piece from the casing itself). Virtually all modern ammunition is centerfire, one of the only remaining rimfire ^note  rounds made in commercial quantities in the 21st century is .22LR. Centerfire primers have the advantage of enabling stronger loads (since the casing doesn't need to be thin enough to be pierced) and the ability to switch the old primer for a new one for recycling brass casings.
• A certain brand of instant soups has jumped on the "save the ugly-shaped veggies!" bandwagon and began advertising the soups (made of freeze-dried vegetables and assorted stuff) as containing "rescued" carrots. Even though ugly-shaped veggies have always been used for industrial cooking, precisely because the shoppers prefer the pretty ones, so the soup is precisely the same soup it used to be, only with a different image on the packaging. Tossing a good vegetable out simply because it looks misshapen is wasteful, hence - unprofitable. This is why the industry doesn't do that.
• Dracula the Un-Dead (2009) proudly advertises itself as "the authorized sequel" to the original novel. What this doesn't let on is that Dracula and all its characters and concepts have been in the Public Domain for decades—technically, any story based on it is "authorized", because the authority to prevent such a story from coming out doesn't exist. The actual meaning of the whole idea is that it was written by Bram Stoker's great-grand-nephew, and thus, theoretically, if the rights to Dracula had somehow remained the sole property of the Stoker estate, then this would be the only authorized sequel to Dracula to exist. Which they didn't.
• Any time an item is described as "military-grade," such as weaponry, camping gear, baggage, and so on, it is a meaningless marketing buzzword that anyone can slap on a label. If the item is actually used by the military in most countries, that means the government gave the contract to the lowest-bidding company and the item is dirt-cheap, offering the barest minimum level of acceptable performance. "Military-grade" is the floor for quality, not the ceiling, and anyone who has served will avoid such items in their civilian lives. At best, the claim is used to jack up the price for people who don't know better. At worst, the claim is actually true. Military-spec, on the other hand, usually means that a part has the same exact dimensions and measurements as GI equipment, so they're guaranteed to fit together.
• Lunchly is a brand of snack kits launched in 2024 as a joint venture between popular YouTubers MrBeast, KSI, and Logan Paul as a competitor to similar snack kits like Lunchables, explicitly marketing itself as a healthier alternative by comparing its calories, sugar, protein, and — most infamously of all — proudly displaying its high amount of electrolytes, which in the context of food is just sodium^note . Critics were quick to point this as a blatant case of making a negative appear as a positive with a cool-sounding buzzword, and how Lunchly is loaded with sodium and saturated fats (something that goes conspicuously unmentioned in their stat comparisons to Lunchables), far too much to be deemed "healthy", let alone "healthier."

• Omega Mart:
  • One recurring label marks food as "Naturally Boneless."
  • Available for purchase are Nut-free Salted Peanuts,^* which are "100% Salt" and packaged in a typical container of such. The fact that peanuts aren't actually nuts is not mentioned.
  • Some products are labeled as "Organically Recommended" — as in recommended by organic life forms, not that it's a quality product made from organic substances.

• Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album has the String sketch, where an advertiser is looking for a way to sell 122,000 miles of string... in 3-inch lengths. Among others, the advertiser describes them as pre-sliced, rust-proof, easy to handle, low-calorie, and free from artificial coloring. When he learns they're not waterproof, he switches to water-absorbent.

• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac showed an ad for a poster of Happy Noodle Boy that was made with non-poisonous ink.

• In The Bob's Burgers Movie, Calvin Fischoeder promotes the Wonder Wharf with a pamphlet reading, "Eighty years of cheap thrills and almost no decapitations."

• In Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, Greg mentions passing by hotels with signs advertising their "Color TV", which, as he says, "is not something to brag about this day and age".

• On 30 Rock, Liz felt socially responsible because her awesome new jeans had a "Hand made in USA" label. Then Jack corrected her pronunciation, revealing that the jeans were made by the "Hohnd" people, slave laborers in the despotic island nation of "Usa" (pronounced like "Oosa").
• In the first episode of Mad Men, Don gives Lucky Strike cigarettes the tagline "it's toasted!" which all tobacco is. This was a real Lucky Strike advertising gimmick, though it dates back to 1917, not 1960.
• The Goodies: On "It Might as Well Be String" (a spoof of the advertising industry), their ad campaign for Sunbeam Sliced Bread claims that "Nine out of Ten Doctors Agree that people who eat Sunbeam Sliced Bread are less likely to be trampled to death by elephants". Graeme does mention that it was a struggle to find the right nine doctors, however. And the elephants.
• Gob's banana stand in Arrested Development. "Finally a frozen banana that won't make you sick and kill you!"
• An example of the harmful variation from The Sarah Jane Adventures: "BubbleShock! Contains Bane!"
• The "Fairsley Difference" sketch on Mr. Show showed a homespun grocery chain, Gibbons, driven to bankruptcy by a competitor's slick ads boasting about horrible conditions the competitor's stores did not suffer from, such as homeless people defecating in the aisles, or customers' children being abducted into homoerotic slavery in Pakistani whorehouses. They never say these things are true of Gibbons, so they aren't actually lying.
• Inverted on The Daily Show, when a pediatrics group advocated against hot dogs, Aasif Mandvi gave "threats" about eating hot dogs, like "Eating hot dogs provides none of your daily fruit intake", "People that eat hot dogs have a 100% chance of dying", and "If you lined up all of the deaths from hot dogs, they would stretch some of the distance to the Sun".
• Top Gear: During a series 11 news segment, the team goes over the advertisement for the Citroen Berlingo (one of the cheapest cars on the market at the time). All of the special features listed in the ad are things that are found on pretty much every single car on the market, but the best of them is when it says that the car features "manually adjustable door mirrors".

  Jeremy Clarkson: As opposed to what? The only alternative is electrical, isn’t it?
  Richard Hammond: Which are better, so that's just saying it's something it hasn't got.

• Many submissions (usually around April 1) of tool-assisted speedruns to TASVideos.org mention that the run "does not color a dinosaur." (Color a Dinosaur is an infamously low-quality coloring book for the NES, and is considered by TASVideos to be a bad game choice.)
• A study of drinking water disinfectants expresses concern that iodine based disinfectants are not regulated by the EPA in drinking water. Of course, this is because it is unheard of to disinfect water with iodine unless you're a backwoods hiker (and even then, portable filters are far more popular these days). Every system uses the much cheaper chlorine.
• Seanbaby mocks the common use of "Fat Free!" on sugary candies in this article:

  "Are you insecure, candy? Because you don't see gravy bragging about being sugar free. This label is so irrelevant to consumer health that I think it's only there so doctors can laugh when they ask you questions about how you got diabetes."

• YouTube channel Outside Xbox: the only review show guaranteed not to kidnap you and harvest your organs for sale on the black market!

  Mike: Wait, do other shows do that?
  Andy: Well, I don't see them guaranteeing that they won't.

• Sethical:
  • "boneless pizza" (warning: sensory abuse) is a strange case of someone asking for this specifically and becoming irate when it's suggested that what they want is only made in the way they're specifying.
  • The same guy has a similar problem in the "bread shop" video. After he mistakes the cashier talking about gluten-free bread for this trope, he blows up at him to wonder why people would put gluten in the bread in the first place, tells the guy to take out the gluten, and refuses to buy any of the already gluten-free options because they're making buying bread too complicated.
• Game Theory once said the food company that sponsored one of their videos produced food that was "Radiation free". Then again, the fact that the video that was sponsored was a Fallout video means it was obviously tongue in cheek. Although some food (mostly canned goods) IS disinfected with radiation, although this is quite rare because everyone is scared of radiation.

• Fat, French and Fabulous is a non-GMO, gluten free Podcast.
• The fine products and services that sponsor Behind the Bastards' are repeatedly emphasised to not cause whatever horribleness that week's bastard did, including (but not limited to) not killing any children, not starting any brainwashing cults, and not banning the use of the word 'ketchup'. Robert also at one point nearly claims that they are guaranteed to not have been complicit in genocide, before correcting himself to probably not been complicit in genocide in case they are sponsored by any German company active before 1945.

• A Prairie Home Companion has segments "sponsored" by "Old Folks at Home Cottage Cheese", which is the only brand of cottage cheese which promises right on the label that it contains no arsenic and no formaldehyde. We're not saying other cottage cheeses do, but isn't it suspicious that they've never come out and said so?

• A newspaper advert for a "Genuine Mexican coathanger. Only $5." When the curious shoppers send away for their coathanger, they receive a rusty nail.
• An advert explaining that, while marijuana cannot be sold through the mail, "grass" can. People who fell for it got a packet of lawn clippings.
• A company that was selling clotheslines as "wind-powered clothes dryers".
• Canned tuna/salmon:
  • A tuna company that gets a shipment of accidentally bleached tuna and markets it with the slogan "doesn't turn pink in the can!" A common variation includes a competitor selling the pink product putting out a competing slogan, "never bleached!"
  • This story is also told about canned salmon. In this (somewhat more likely) version of the tale, the salmon in question was simply a different variety whose flesh was paler, and the advertising campaign was meant to quell consumer fears that something was wrong with the white salmon.
  • There's a third version of this story out there in which the white salmon is advertised as a rare delicacy with a price to match, even though there's no difference in flavor or quality between it and regular salmon.
  • Farm-raised pink salmon are often fed red food dyes to turn pink (wild salmon eat shrimp, which colors their meat; farm-raised salmon is usually fed cornmeal and fish meal, resulting in a white meat). Undyed salmon advertised as such is probably just a question of time.
• The dihydrogen monoxide hoax is an inversion of this practice, where something totally harmless is made to sound incredibly deadly, using true but misleading statements.

• One of the games in Rhythm Heaven Fever, "Packing Pests", has the player packaging "Spider-Free Candy". The packing plant is infested with spiders that you have you have to swat away. This being Rhythm Heaven, it's entirely possible that spider-infested candy is an actual problem here.
• Portal 2: Aperture Science shower curtains contain less than 1% mercury. Given that Aperture's other products tend to be radioactive, laden with asbestos, or otherwise harmful, they might actually think this is an achievement worth advertising.
• In Pokémon:
  • Magikarp is an intentionally terrible Joke Character (Jokémon?). This image◊ extolls its virtues using a lot of this type of logic.
  • This also shows up in the memetic "Diggersby, tho?!" rant. The narrator praises Diggersby's Huge Power ability, which treats its Attack stat as doubled in combat. Diggersby has a poor Attack stat to begin with, so even with Huge Power it's not broken, and the rest of its stats are mediocre at best. Additionally, Huge Power is not unique to Diggersby, and in fact it has the second lowest attack of all fully-evolved Huge Power users (only barely beating Azumarill, who has way better bulk and typing). While it is a Lethal Joke Character in lower tiers due to its ridiculously strong Earthquakes, it's not some overwhelmingly strong monster.
• Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus gives us a variation, where a marquee advertisement tries to spin a flaw as a positive.:

  SoulStorm Brew... twice the flavor... twice the bones... twice the price!

• Fallout's Nuka-Cola Quantum, much like Oddworld's SoulStorm Brew, had advertising trying to spin flaws into positives, with Nuka-Cola proudly advertising Quantum as having "twice the calories, twice the carbohydrates, twice the caffeine, and twice the taste".
• World of Warcraft: During Brewfest, there is a daily where you are tasked with promoting one of the major breweries. For Alliance players barking for the Barleybrew Brewery, one of the random shouts takes this to its logical conclusion:

  "Barleybrew brew! Won't fill you up, won't kill you... the Thunderbrews can't say the same."

• Happiness (Steve Cutts): In the introductory scroll up, an advert promotes a hamburger made of "100% misc. meat" as if all processed meat wasn't made of just that (plus flour, salt, and who knows what). Of course, this is a parody of this kind of commercials.
• Homestar Runner: Bubs sells donuts shipped from a third-world country named Homemáde, so he could legally print "From Homemáde" on the box.

• The Y2K section of RinkWorks’ Computer Stupidities has multiple anecdotes about devices like flashlights, electronic scales and bread slicers being advertised as Y2K compliant. As they don't have any date-related systems, they can't be affected by the Millennium Bug anyway. One company even tried to sell jumper cables that would supposedly make your car Y2K compliant (and they cost twice as much as "regular" jumper cables).

• JonTron: In "Bubsy Collection," JonTron points out that having 1-ups in a game is not a selling point after the box art for Bubsy 3D claimed it was.

  Jontron: Okay, hold the phone! Having 1-Ups in your game is not a selling point! Let alone a bullet on the back of the box! You can just tell they were really stretching to say even one good thing about this game.

• Discussed in this Tom Scott video (xkcd comic included) as one of the ways you can flout Grice's maxims of conversation. Scott himself uses "vegan tomatoes" as a similar example.

• In the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "Cookie Dough", Bloo gets carried away coming up with rhyming tag-lines for Madame Foster's home-made cookies, and ends up describing them as "The home-made concoction that's free of dioxins!" He then has to explain to the crowd what dioxins are, which he eventually boils down to "They're bad for you!".
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: After most of an episode of Eddy being hit by multiple terrible things because of a supposedly-cursed phone in "Sorry, Wrong Ed", one of his scams consists of selling rebranded Chunky Puffs cereal that is guaranteed to be "100% curse-free".
• The Simpsons: Dr. Nick advertises with the line "If I kill you, you don't pay!"
  • When Homer asks Apu if he has any healthy food for sale, Apu lists "low-salt candy bars," "reduced-fat soda" and beef jerky that's "now nearly rectum-free!"
• One South Park episode features a commercial for "Weight Gain 4000", a kind of protein shake that boasts "its patented formula is designed to enter the mouth, and go to directly to the stomach where it is distributed to the bloodstream!" Presumably, as opposed to all those foods that don't reach the stomach or get their nutrients in the bloodstream, the two things food is supposed to do.