Now listen to part of a lecture in a business ethics class.
The professor is discussing advertising.
Professor: Advertisers often try to sell you things by exaggerating about the quality of their products. It helps them get your attention. And exaggeration in advertising is usually considered acceptable, but not always. In the United States, there are laws to help determine what advertisers can say about their products. Basically, the law says advertisers can exaggerate as long as no one's gonna actually believe the exaggeration and take it literally. So, the exaggeration has to be very extreme. If it's not extreme enough and someone would actually buy the product because they believed the exaggeration, that advertisement may be illegal. Take this example: a vacuum cleaner manufacturer made a vacuum cleaner that didn't weigh very much, and they wanted to get the point across about how light it was. So they made a TV commercial showing the vacuum cleaner floating in the air while cleaning the house. Well, that was a visual exaggeration. It got people's attention. And because a floating vacuum cleaner is obviously impossible, the commercial was legal because no one would actually believe the visual exaggeration and buy the vacuum cleaner because they thought it floated in the air. But what if the company wanted to show that the vacuum cleaner was very powerful? What if it made a television commercial where a person uses the vacuum cleaner to perfectly clean this really big and really dirty carpet in, uh, just a few seconds? Well, that would really grab your attention. But the thing is, even though that commercial is an exaggeration, you can imagine someone actually believing it and buying the vacuum cleaner and then being very disappointed because the vacuum cleaner couldn't do that. So advertisers can't use an exaggeration like that because it's actually not extreme enough and someone might believe it.
Using the example of the vacuum cleaner, explain when it is legally acceptable to use exaggeration in advertising and when it is not.
In the lecture, the professor states that exaggeration in advertising is usually acceptable as long as it is extreme. If not, if someone buy the advertised products due to its exaggeration, it is illegal according to the law in the United States. The professor take vacuum cleaner as an example. When the TV commercial showed the vacuum cleaner floating in the air to demonstrate that this cleaner didn’t weigh much, it is acceptable since no one would believe the cleaner could really float in the air. However, if the manufacturer made a television commercial where a person use a vacuum cleaner to clean a really big and dirty carpet in just a few seconds, it is not extreme enough because someone would really purchase the product due to this exaggeration.
