Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon. Every year brands spend millions of dollars
creating adverts to promote their products in the hope that you will part with your
hard-earned cash and buy what they are promoting. In adverts, they are allowed to make up stories...
or spend lots of money on CGI or perhaps turn their product into a lovable character.
Oh hey what you got there oh sleepy time.
They could write a jingle ... or they could hire a celebrity
or hire a celebrity to sing their jingle.
They can do all of those things but they cannot I repeat can not do anything that is misleading
or deceptive that would cause you to buy their product or pay a higher price for their product
than you would have if you knew that it wasn't true. So in other words they can't lie to you.
Nope. So let's look at a few cases over the years where brands have got themselves into
trouble we'll start with Ribena. For many many years they ran adverts that said this:
Ribena has the delicious taste you love because it's made with the juice of natural black currants
and black currants have four times the vitamin C of oranges. Four times the vitamin C of oranges
yeah yeah I think we're about to be squeezed out. If we look at the vitamin C into black currants
they contain 181 milligrams of Vitamin C per 100 grams and if we look at the vitamin C content of
oranges they contain 45 milligrams of Vitamin C per 100 grams and 45 times 4 is 180. So that
means that is a true statement black currants do have four times the vitamin C content of oranges
per 100 grams. However that has led most people to think that Ribena has four times the vitamin
C content of orange juice but if we take a look at that this orange juice has 20 milligrams of
Vitamin C per 100 mls this one has 40 milligrams per 100 ml and the Ribena syrup when made up as
directed has only 10 milligrams of Vitamin C per 100 mils so where did all the vitamin C from the
black currants go? Well if we take a look at the ingredients and keep in mind ingredients have to
be listed in order of the most to the least by weight of what's contributing to the product. So
if we have a look at the ingredients there you can see the first ingredient is sugar and the second
ingredient is water and the third ingredient is reconstituted blackcurrant juice at 28.6 percent.
So the syrup is only 28.6 black currants the rest is sugar and water but that's the syrup. We then
have to dilute the syrup in the directions say to dilute it one part syrup to five parts water
and once we do that that percentage of black currants in the drink comes all the way down to
five percent. So while black currants themselves do have four times the vitamin C of oranges Ribena
does not have four times the vitamin C of orange juice it doesn't even have the same amount of
vitamin C as orange juice, it has a lot less vitamin C than orange juice does. So the court
found that this four-times statement that they'd used in advertising while technically true was
misleading to customers and was not okay and it got worse there were two school students in New
Zealand, two girls were doing their science fair project and they were testing the vitamin C Level
of different drinks and one of the ones they were testing was the ready to drink Ribena and they
found it not to have any vitamin seen it at all so they tested again they checked with teachers to
make sure they were doing the test correctly, they reached out to the company and got no reply and
cut a long story short eventually the commission got involved and did their own testing and found
no detectable vitamin C in the drink at all! Now no explanation was given for this apart from the
brand had not accounted for degradation of vitamin C in storage. Vitamin C is quite sensitive to heat
and things like that and so I'm assuming that's what the problem was but regardless there was no
vitamin C in there and they'd labeled that there was so they were fined $270,000 for misleading
advertising for the four times claim and for the mislabeled products so brands have to be careful
with what they say is in their product and what claims they make. Next let's have a look at Coke.
It's hard to imagine Coke making any health claims but in 2009 they ran a myth busting
ad campaign in Australia and that said amongst other things that it was a myth that coke was
packed with caffeine and a myth that it rots your teeth and a myth that it makes you fat.
The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) got lots of complaints about that
ad and when they looked at it they decided that it was misleading to Consumers and
giving the impression that Coke couldn't contribute to weight gain or tooth decay.
Coke said they didn't mean to make the advert misleading but also the amount of
caffeine that they stated was in the coke compared to other products was incorrect,
they had underestimated it with the figures that they gave. So the ACCC ordered them to run
corrective ads that looked like this in all the major newspapers in Australia for the next month.
Next we have A&W Root Beer they ran adverts for many many years that stated that they were made
using aged vanilla it was on all the boxes it was prominent on all of the cans and of course in the
adverts. Crafted with premium ingredients like aged vanilla for a straight from the barrel taste.
And you can see a pile layer at the front of vanilla beans but a New York lawyer has filed
a class action against them alleging that the statement 'made with aged vanilla' gives consumers
the impression that it is made with real vanilla beans which are very expensive but when they
tested the product they found that it contained little or no vanilla beans at all instead it
had artificial vanilla flavoring. The brand said that consumers could not be misled by that because
it also says on the packaging naturally and artificially flavored. In the judge's opinion the
reasonable consumer would not know that they're naturally and artificially flavored was referring
to the vanilla and not something else that was in the root beer. It's also a bit of a concern if
there is actually no vanilla bean in it at all. The brand argues that there is vanilla bean in
it and this case is ongoing for the moment they seem to have removed the made with aged vanilla
off their cans but no decision has been made. Class actions take years and years and years
often they're settled out of court to stop this ongoing litigation but this one seems to still
be in process so you'll have to see what happens. What do you think, did made with aged vanilla give
you the impression that it had real vanilla beans in it? Did it mislead you should they be fined for
that? I'll let you make your own ruling if you were the judge what would you think next we have
Teami Teas. There's a reason that like 200 000 people worldwide are drinking our tea. They paid
infants and celebrities to promote their teas and according to some of those posts Teami Tea's
could promote weight loss. And they'll help you lose weight fast I don't got time to be working
out. I was not losing weight fast enough and then it's like I started doing Teami. Another post said
it could prevent colds and flus it could relieve migraines it could unclog arteries and it could
even fight cancer. So this is pretty powerful tea but the FTC said they didn't have any scientific
studies that could back up those claims which is required by law. If you're going to make a health
Claim about your product you have to actually do scientific studies that prove that your product
does that thing that you are claiming. If not you can't say that it does that you can't just
say this is what's going to happen if you drink this. So they will find one million dollars for
breaking the law and in this case the influencers who promoted them were also sent a warning because
they hadn't declared that it was a sponsored post. According to the FTC's rules you actually have to
very clearly tell people if something is sponsored you can't just put thanks to the brand down in
hashtags further down hidden in the post where no one's ever going to see it in fact if it's a
video promoting it you're supposed to in the video not just in the description below tell the people
who are watching it that this is sponsored so they know if it's a paid ad or if it's just your
opinion about a product that you've paid for yourself and purchased yourself. That's why I
always say with thanks to a sponsor before there's an advert section so you know that that bit is
sponsored or not. Moving on in 2014 Red Bull found themselves the centre of a class action.
Someone sued them for false advertising because it doesn't actually give you wings.
That is not what the class action was about the statement: Red Bull gives you wings, is
allowed because it's counted as puffery or extreme exaggeration something which a reasonable consumer
would be expected to know was not true. So when you watch those adverts most consumers would know
that if they drink Red Bull they're not going to grow wings and fly away. Instead the class action
was alleging that the adverts gave the impression that drinking Red Bull would give you enhanced
concentration and performance. What you'll need is a Red Bull... you mean because it gives you wings?
Yes but it also vitalizes the mind. And they cited several studies which said
that the only thing the energy drinks were giving you any boost on performance or concentration the
only thing in them was caffeine. The other things in them like taurine or guarana were
not actually making any difference to performance or concentrations and because Red Bull has less
caffeine in it than a cup of coffee they're claiming that those adverts were misleading.
I can Calculate 90 trillion moves in advance. Not fair. Red Bull denied any wrongdoing at
all and said their adverts were not misleading but in order to not have a lengthy and costly
class-action court case they instead decided to settle for $13 million. Now once that was
split between all the many people who signed up saying they had been misled and they needed to be
reimbursed it came down to only $4.25 per person who was part of that class action. So not much at
all but I guess a warning to advertisers if you liked this video and you'd like to know about
more court cases with misleading advertising let me know by liking sharing and commenting on the
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you can do for someone do something unexpected for them this week. I'll see you on Friday 💕