#159 Disclaimers

#159 Blog Post - Tuesday, 14 June 2022

 http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2022/06/159-disclaimers.html

Posted by Denny Hatch

The Nutty Business
Of Legal Disclaimers

 

 

Announcing: "The Blaux Portable Bidet"

A serial prowler of the Internet  I stumbled across the above little ad somewhere and was immediately intrigued. I went to the website and downloaded all the copy and design.

 

The $49 "Blaux Portable Bidet" is a kind of water pistol designed to replace old fashioned toilet paper.

 

What a strange name for a product! I thought. For starters, only 12% of bathrooms in homes and hotels in United States are equipped with a bidet.

 

Yeah, these bathroom fixtures are all over Europe.  But to a huge percentage of Americans, the word bidet (Is it pronounced "by-dette"?) is meaningless.

 

I skimmed the features and benefits, found the entire proposition to be nose-wrinkling unpleasant and was about to delete everything and move on to some other subject...

 

... when I came across the most extraordinary disclaimer statement in the history of advertising.

 

Copyright © 2022 All Rights Reserved.

Privacy Policy | Terms of Use

This is an advertisement and not an actual news article, blog, or consumer protection update.

The story depicted on this site and the person depicted in the story are not actual news. Rather, this story is based on the results that some people who have used these products have achieved. The results portrayed in the story and in the comments are illustrative and may not be the results that you achieve with these products. This page could receive compensation for clicks on or purchase of products featured on this site.

 

All product and company names are trademarks™ or registered® trademarks of their respective holders. Unless specifically identified as such, our use of third-party trademarks does not indicate any relationship, sponsorship, or endorsement between strong current and the owners of these trademarks. Any references by us to third party trademarks are to identify the corresponding third-party goods and/or services and fall under nominative fair use under the trademark law.

 

Testimonials appearing on this site individual real-life experiences of those who have used our products and/or services in some way or another. The testimonials are voluntarily provided with no compensation. The results are not typical and are not necessarily representative of all of those who will use our products and/or services. They cannot be guaranteed. Before and after photos were not retouched or altered. Results were self-reported by the customer and therefore cannot be confirmed. Our company is not responsible for any of the opinions or comments posted on our site.

 

 Don't squint. Here's that last line in readable type:

 

"Our company is not responsible for
any of the opinions or comments
posted on our site."

 

Holy smokes! In 60 years of direct marketing — as a copywriter, publisher, editor-in-chief, ad salesman, and reporter — I had never ever come across such a "Blanket Disclaimer."

 

What this unbelievable message is really saying: "These 16 words hereby give the perpetrators of this website full license to lie, cheat and steal."

 

In plain English: "Don't waste your time. Everything you read here is probably B.S."

 

• For the full story of Blaux Portable Bidet online promotion, here is the link.

  

About "Promises" Made by Advertisers

Okay, copywriters and agency creative directors can get carried away dreaming up features and benefits. If the smartypants creatives are not reined in, the advertiser can land in Big Trouble — with a capital B and a capital T — with the Federal Trade Commission.

 

An example is the "Pump-'n'-Dump Industry.

 

At a Direct Marketing Association convention exhibit hall long ago I bumped into a copywriter I had known for 30 years and asked what he was up to.

 

 “I specialize in pump-'n'-dump.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“If you need capital for your company, I can help you pump up the price of your penny stock and then you can dump it on the market and it will be snapped up by speculators.

 

Here a classic "Pump-'n'-Dump direct mail outer envelope received in the WHO'S MAILING WHAT! archive on Jan. 24, 2012:

 

Below is the lingo for the generic legal Disclaimer that makes Pump-'n'-Dump promises allowable. Disclaimers are usually found in 8-point gray mousetype—hard as hell to read and easy peasy to ignore by greedy suckers visualizing obscene 813% profits.

 

Revered Corporations Hide Behind Disclaimers:
Large Print on United Airlines/Chase Envelope

 

 

Below: United Airlines/Chase Disclaimer Document

Let's parse these exclusions/disclaimers from my book, Write Everything Right! 

What’s going on is a textbook example of how lawyers and complicit marketers can come up with a way to tell customers and prospects they can be screwed with absolutely no recourse. This stuff is typical of the entire financial services industry. The trick: make it so impossibly difficult to comprehend nobody will bother to read the thing.

A final note about financial services marketing

The word “services” (as in “financial services”) reminds me of a story told by the late Barry Gray, the mellifluous-voiced fixture on New York talk radio for 50 years.

      On a late-night broadcast, Gray did a riff on the boyhood of the great American humorist, trick rope artist and Ziegfeld Follies star Will Rogers and the meaning of the word “service.”

     When Rogers was 10 years old, he was sitting on the split-rail fence of his family’s 400-acre spread located on the shore of Lake Oologah, Oklahoma. He looked up and saw an immense, blue-ribbon-prize bull from the adjoining ranch being led across his property. Its destination was the adjacent ranch where he was scheduled to service a prize heifer.

     “Since then, every time I hear the word ‘service,’” Rogers said years later, “I know somebody is going to get screwed.”

 

If you want to obfuscate, here are the rules to break

• “Column Width: 35 to 55 characters is a good target range for optimum comprehension. Ten or eleven point type is generally most readable on a column width of about a third of a page.” —Ed Elliott

         (Note: The columns in the UAL-Chase disclaimer are 190 characters wide.)

• “Type smaller than 9-point is difficult for most people to read.” —David Ogilvy

         (Note: The Chase/UA disclaimer copy is 8-point.)

 

• Want to make copy tough to read? Create gray walls of type set it in gray sans serif type. The lighter the gray the more impossible to read.

 

Takeaways to Consider

• "Avoid gray walls of type." —David Ogilvy.

 

• "Direct mail [direct marketing] should be scrupulously honest." —Dick Benson

 

• "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away."
— Tom Waits

 

• "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
    —William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, Act IV, Scene 2

 

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