We've all been there. The Too Good to Be True Zone.
As someone who works in and around Marketing and sees the the retail aisles full of gimmicks to get me to buy a particular product, I have a pretty jaundiced eye when it comes to Too Good to Be True.
But in this day and age of the Twitter Democracy, you wonder if running a Deal of the Century campaign with a bunch of small print full of caveats embedded in it might not just bite you in the bum (as the British might say).
Case in point, the Mouse Print blog is devoted to the fine print in advertisements.
Or the print that makes you say, "Ah, so it is too good to be true!"
Like these recently covered topics:
A Kmart advertisement that promises a $10 debit card when you purchase ANY of the $3+ items pictured in the ad. (Unfortunately the fine print contradicts the body copy of the ad, you need to purchase at least $25 worth of the products to qualify for the card. D'oh!)
Nabisco offers free Chips Ahoy cookies when a consumer visited their Facebook page. Not so fast, it's not as straightforward as, say TGIFriday's offer of a free hamburger when you visited their page. To get the cookie coupon, you need to first 1) buy a gallon of milk, 2) buy a package of Nabisco cookies and 3) become of fan of the cookies on Facebook. (In other words, it's MUCH easier to just go and buy the 2.99 cookies yourself.)
As Twitter evolves, it'll be interesting to see if the upswing of consumer advocacy will help clear out some of the little tiny fonts littering full page ads.
(Photo by Bascom Hogue)
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