Spuds - Finally, a cigarette that's good for you!......???

So apparently there was a brand of cigarettes called "spuds". Also, apparently, they were good for your cold, helped soothe a hoarse voice, cured your cough, and moistened your throat.

Click for big.

Sure, it was 1943, and we should go easy on them because the scientific method hadn't been invented yet, and nobody knew cigarettes were bad for you, right? Of course not. Let's get started.

What advertisers want most is for you to glance at the ad for a few seconds, accept their message and not look at any small writing. And most of all, do not pay attention to what the copy is very carefully NOT saying... probably because there are laws expressly forbidding them from just lying to you. However, deceptive implications and suggestions are super great. Ads like this from The Past are less sophisticated in the way they try to deceive you, but this still goes on today. Let's identify some logical fallacies.

Good for your cold. "Thousands do this, therefore they must be right." This is a perfect bandwagon fallacy. It's the old "Twenty thousand mothers can't be wrong." argument. They sure can be wrong. Also, the careful use of "seems" eliminates any objectivity and falsifiability from the argument. You can't prove or disprove how something "seems".

"They're not a remedy". A fleeting shred of truth, but then back to the deceit. "But many find them more agreeable". Bandwagon again, along with some of the anecdotal fallacy. In the end they're just comparing the experience of smoking Spuds to other cigarettes. "Pleasing" is subjective. What the ad is not saying is that their cigarettes will heal a stressed throat, but they'd be happy if you got that impression. Assuming that you have to smoke something is a false dilemma fallacy. "You must either smoke spuds or 'ordinary' cigarettes. The other option is smoking nothing, which would be better that anything else.

"Does not produce...acrolein". This is a red herring argument. Absence of acrolein doesn't mean the other compounds present in the smoke aren't bad for you. Their proud acrolien-related announcement is intended to distract you from thinking about all the other myriad chemicals present in cigarette smoke. This statement about acrolein could still be true if the cigarettes created plutonium when burnt.

"Enjoy the feeling...". Subjective and not provable.

"If your throat is over-strained, you better smoke Spuds" (paraphrased). This is another false dilemma argument. better still to stop smoking. To suggest that only Spuds can give this feeling of cool refreshment (something subjective) avoids a lie. Saying "only we can give you this ambiguous thing" is safely meaningless.

It's likely that everyone who worked at the Axton-Fisher Tobacco Company is now dead. It's also likely that everyone who worked there at the time this ad was prouced smoked Spuds. If these two things were verifiable, we could then enjoy the most fun-to-say logical fallacy by assuming that all of the workers are dead because of smoking Spuds. This would be a "post hoc ergo proptor hoc" fallacy, or "after this, because of this". Some of the workers may have, in fact, been killed by the marketing department after announcing that their cigarette line would be called "Spuds".

Pream - Patterns in the fog.

It's been a little while since we had a decent Graphic Gift, so today's ad comes at a fine time. This ad for Pream has a great clip art lady head.

Pream was (Google doesn't seem to think Pream is around any more.) a coffee creamer made from dairy products and other milk stuff. Quite unlike Coffee-Mate, which is famously a non-dairy creamer that continues to dominate the market, Pream wasn't okay to use if you were lactose intolerant. Maybe that made the difference that killed Pream? It sure wasn't for lack of a snappy name. "Pream" is way simpler and catcher than "Coffee-Mate".

My dad always had Coffee-Mate, which had a similar picture on the label - a steaming cup with the white product swirling and dissolving into the coffee. Here's the weird thing: as a single-digit-old kid, I studied this picture trying to figure out what was swimming in the coffee. It just wouldn't register as a random swirl of creamer. My brain demanded that it BE something.

This is a uniquely human psychological phenomena, called Pareidolia, that makes our brain want to see patterns in random stimuli. It's why we look at clouds and see Lincoln's head or hear voices in the wind. Pareidolia was an evolutionary advantage for us because it allowed us to learn why things happen, like migration of prey animals and predicting the seasons. It's a driving trait behind analysis that animals don't have. However, combine it with a little egocentrism or paranoia, and depending on who you ask, it can account for everything from the "face on Mars", religious phenomena, and pretty much every conspiracy theory there's ever been. We can't let Pareidolia make us think crazy shit. You know how, maybe twice in your life, a street light has gone out just when you drove past it? Believe it or not, you don't have some magical power that interferes with electrical systems. It was just random. When a street light reaches the end of it's functional life, odds are somebody will be driving past. How many times have you driven past a street light that has totally failed to go out at that moment? I'll bet lots.

As a kid, for some reason, despite the obvious presence of the spoon and cup, I couldn't see the random swirl of Coffee-Mate as it was. My leading theory was that there was a sea serpent in the coffee. I didn't' think my dad was drinking a sea serpent, maybe because watching the action of him stirring a spoon of powder into the coffee made everything clear. But the picture on the jar mostly looked like a something slithering in a brown pool, but I had other theories, depending on how late it was, how sleepy I was, and what I had for dinner. Weird.

Anyway, about that lady head. Sure, she's no candidate for the Disembodied Floating Head deathmatches, but she's easily perky enough to be useful as clip art. She has been lovingly pen tooled out of her background by our elite staff of old-world craftsmen so that we could present her to you, our loyal readers, in two sizes - big and less big. I know, you're endlessly grateful. But, try not to vote me into public office. I'm not running for anything and you wouldn't want someone in office who fails to see a threat in every random event. I'm not seven any more.

 You're welcome.

Click for big.

Click for less big.

Click for big.

Did someone say "gimme a friggin' Pream commercial? No? Well, here are some! Watch or don't!!!

Kaywoodie Pipes - For his health.

Smoking news now, from 1957! Smoking is good for your nerves, (once you're addicted to the nicotine). Nervousness is bad for your health. Therefore, smoking is good for you. "Learning to relax the Kaywoodie way could add years to his life" End of discussion!

The research and Googling team had a hard time finding proof of exactly what year we knew that pipe smoking was basically just as bad for your health as cigarette smoking. The long and short of it is that any tissue that comes in contact with smoke is at a much greater risk of cancer. Pipe and cigar smokers tend not to inhale the smoke into the lungs, like cigarette smokers do. The smoke is held in the mouth for a few seconds and then exhaled. This decreases the risk of lung cancer, but oral cancer and tooth-falling-out-ness is still pretty horrible and somehow more gross than just having your lungs rot.

So, while this 1957 ad MAY have been produced with the ignorance of pipe smoking's negative effects (yeah right), they're still using some deceptive arguments on the reader. Fans of logic call this kind of thing "logical fallacies". A passing familiarity with a list of logical fallacies (see that link) makes you mush less of a sucker and way less desirable as a chump to advertisers. Logical fallacies will tend to leap out at you, once you learn to recognize a few of them.

Most - if not all - advertising uses some kind of logical fallacy to try and get you to hand over some money, because the most logical thing to do is always to assume advertisers are constantly lying to you, and buy nothing. When I first scanned this Kaywoodie ad, I was expecting the "appeal to antiquity" argument, which can be summarized as "People have been doing this for a long time, so it must be good." You know, pipes being all old-timey and stuff. The appeal to antiquity is constantly used to sell superstitious herbal remedies like acupuncture and ginseng, both of which have yet to be proven to do anything at all, beyond the placebo effect.

But nope, no antiquity here. Kaywoodie is handing out a heaping helping of red herring, though. A red herring is basically misdirection. "Don't pay attention to that. Look at this over here." Kaywoodie argues that pipe smoking is relaxing, despite the fact that you're effing up your health. Even there they are assuming you're already addicted to the smoke. First-timers wouldn't really get much relaxation from the experience, apart from the feeling that they look cool or are impressing someone, as the title of the ad says.

The pipe in the ad is $50. Holy hell, that's like 400 bucks in today's money! Weirder still, I found a Kaywoodie pipe that seems a lot like the one in the picture, and it's going for $27. What goes on? Farther down, the ad mentions matched sets selling for up to $2500. Whaaa? They must be made from the Elephant Man's pelvis or something. Those have got to be some incredible pipes. And just for those of you playing along at home, that's called the "appeal to wealth" fallacy.

Fletcher's Castoria - Mama yo quiero. Mama yo quiero.

Today's ad comes to us from 1947, when castor oil was still used as capitol punishment in every cartoon. Nice picture.

Here we see a young Ed Grimley apparently having trouble "getting the train to leave the station". Apparently babies eat a lot of cheese, and when they do, not even their favorite Thorin Oakenshield doll can cheer them up.

"You must go to... the bathroom. And if
there's time, to the Lonely Mountain."

My mom never had castor oil in the house, to my knowledge. I guess that, by the time I was rocking the suburbs, we had others remedies for agoraphobic post-consumer waste. I could check with mom for details, but then I would know details. No thanks.

Fletcher's Castoria seems careful not to call itself "castor oil". My guess is that, before then, castor oil was the only game in town for constipation. However, castor oil had a few side effects like "painful cramps, fecal incontinence and explosive diarrhea". Wowzers. So, maybe that's what Fletcher's meant when they say that their senna-based remedy would "not cause griping or discomfort". So what's "senna"? Just a plant. The Wikipedia article on senna doesn't mention anything about explosive diarrhea or anything, so I guess it loosens the juice without blasting it straight through your diaper.

Here's a brilliant Tom & Jerry cartoon (Baby Puss) in which Tom is continually humiliated and is eventually force-fed castor oil (7:05) by a little girl, playing at being an irresponsible parent. The work features such timeless themes as parental abandonment, bullying, and child abuse. This cartoon is from the days when cartoons were allowed to be funny, and as such, cruelty figures prominently in the story. Please enjoy with your whole family!



 The song that the alley cats sing is Mama Yo Quiero (at 5:55), which, for those of you with no Spanish or who have never heard of "Spanish", means "I want my mama". Here's Harpo and Chico Marx playing the same song in "The Big Store". Holy crap were those guys talented.



This ad makes a clumsy feint at the logical fallacy of "argument from authority", typified by "Take it from me - I'm a professional in the field of whatever we're selling." This is implied by their inclusion of a clip art drawing of a nurse, as well as a fake quote attributed to the drawing. Good job, Advertising. I'm totally convinced. You may think that I'm just being mean to an old ad, but this is still the basis of lots of commercials. The argument from authority fallacy is easily disputed by the fact that any person can be wrong, or corrupt, or irrational, or biased, or dishonest, even if they're trained in something.

To help you make your own health claims, here's the nurse is in lovely jpeg format. You can use her to tell your kids that things are good or bad for them, or that they should shut up and do as you say because you have a picture of a nurse on your side. There. You can now make an argument as well as any advertising executive. You're welcome.

Click for slightly big.

Click for big.

Contac - Name the logical fallacy.

This ad is not interesting or cool-looking for any reason. That should bring it up short against the granite editorial policy of P.A.G. and relegate it to the "reject" pile of post fodder. However, it does present to the reader a fairly huge misdirection to the consumer that has always bugged the crap out of me even since I was a kid. So, in it goes. Get ready to help us Name That Logical Fallacy

"All the aspirin in the world can't do for your cold what one Contac capsule can." This pitch is a long-time favorite of the ad business. It's lazy and insulting, and represents a big logical fallacy.

As far back as I can remember, me and my dad used to enjoy tearing apart the retarded logic of commercials. We would watch TV and point out the wild assumptions, misdirections and general lies that the ad business feeds the viewer. We never cited the list of logical fallacies, mostly because we hadn't heard about such a list. But it's good to be able to put a name on the type of bullshit someone's is asking you to accept as fact.

This Contac ad features the "one of ours does what all of theirs could never do" fallacy. It's a confusion of quality for quantity that makes for a striking picture. One little pill going up against a Limbaugh-sized jug of the competitor's pills. The pills in the jug aren't meant to address the same symptoms as the single little hero pill, but that doesn't stop the advertiser from implying that they try but fail massively to measure up to just one little Contac.

Advertisers are so in love with this deception that they still use the hell out of it today. One notable example is the Total cereal campaign, which uses the "You'd need to eat sixteen metric tons of Special K to equal all the fiber in one thimble of Total" argument. Special K is marketed to people who are trying to lose weight, not people trying to "get the train going". This is the pitch that was so exquisitely satirized by the Colon Blow parody on SNL. It demonstrates to the consumer that advertisers hope you're soft-minded and easily fooled. In short, they hope you're stupid. Thanks, ad men.

So what logical fallacy is this? There are a lot of them, and I don't have them memorized. I think it's a "straw man" fallacy, in which an argument is "based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position". The name implies doing battle with a thing that doesn't exist. Nobody made the claim you're trying to dispute. Straw Man fallacies are pretty common. People often attack each others' standpoints incorrectly - either by intent or misunderstanding. It's an easy mistake to make, but there's no excuse to build an ad campaign around it. That's just dishonest. Maybe someone can name a more appropriate logical fallacy for this Contac ad in the comments?

Here are some other ad campaigns that use the same reasoning as today's ad...

-"All the corn in the world won't carry as much lawn furniture as the new Ford F150."

-"You'd need to eat over fifty carpet samples to get the vitamin C found in just one cup of Langer's Apple Juice."

-"I hope you like badgers. You'd need to buy over seven hundred badgers to equal the iron found in just one box of dry wall screws!"