Why tech advertising needs fine print

Maybe I have been watching more TV recently, but tech vendors seem to be spending plenty on TV advertising – and I keep thinking as with pharmaceuticals, they need to spend at least 15 seconds on fine print.

Like Verizon with its 4G LTE commercial below. The ad shows a man at a rural location. The fine print would go “highly unlikely even our 3G coverage works today in this man’s shed. And if our 4G rollout mirrors our 3G rollout and that of our esteemed competitors this past decade it is likely most of the US will not have 4G even by 2020”

 

In the same spirit I would like IBM to qualify its many Smart Planet commercials like the one below with “We have done 2 (or other realistic number) hospital projects like this one in Toronto around the world.  Also, the diagnostics technology came from XXXX and the graphics technology came from XXXX – IBM primarily provided the integration services. And, by the way, we have xx professionals with such project experience out of our global staff of 400,000 IBMers.”

Not just picking on Verizon and IBM. there are plenty of AT&T, HP, Cisco and other commercials that could use similar language. And when Oracle gets ready to run its ads on cloud computing, the 15 seconds may not be enough :)