Exploring deception and puffery in television advertising

Public policy decisions dealing with deceptive advertising have relied extensively on case-by-case adjudication with the Federal Trade Commission. Unfortunately, behavioral evidence has not been considered in the vast majority of these cases. The final determination rests with the Commission’s own expertise in judging an advertisement’s “capacity to deceive.” Consumer response data are not required, although recent developments suggest the FTC is seriously considering the inclusion of meaningful behavioral evidence in policymaking and adjudicative proceedings. This study is one of a series dealing with dimensions of perceived deception across different respondent populations (including students, lawyers, housewives, children, and minority groups). The focus here is on the semantics of deception, i.e., the way in which subjects evaluate selected television commercials which were unofficially rated for deception by FTC staff attorneys. The factor analytic paradigm provides one approach for generating summaries of viewer’s evaluative (affective) responses, and thereby providing some normative or benchmark data of potential value in the regulatory process.