Rigged Contest

Some commercials present a Side by Side Demonstration in the form of a contest. Typically it will feature one person who uses the advertised product and has it all together, competing against someone Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket. The "contest" is usually timed, and the person who picked the advertised item will be done in seconds, having time to drink coffee and read the paper while the other person rips out her hair, has children jumping all over her, and endures other distractions.

Now, usually, the product for which the rigged contest is being held is faster or more efficient. (No one wants the FTC or international equivalent sicced on them.) But that's no excuse for having the person who's using the leading competitor be totally incompetent—that's assuming Consumers Are Morons.


 * Vanguard Mutual Funds has aired a couple of these to symbolize their no-load mutual funds versus the competition's loaded funds. There's one with two hurdlers racing, and Vanguard's hurdles are much lower than the competition. Then there's the toy tugboat race in which a giant hand keeps putting little boxes on the competitor's tugboat...
 * Coke versus Pepsi. Pepsi ran side-by-side blind taste tests, the results being people preferred Pepsi. The problem is, Pepsi is the sweeter of the two, and in a sip-type test, people will prefer the sweeter of the options. When Coke ran their own test, using full serving-size amounts, Coke won.
 * Rogers Canada has the infamous commercial showing a clueless customer who is using the competition. The picture on their screen is lower-res than standard definition, and stretched to the point that everything was twice as wide as it should be. Basically it tried to scare customers into thinking that Bell's HD was considerably worse than regular TV. In reality they're identical quality.
 * It wasn't exactly a contest, but who all remembers the Volvo commercial that featured the enormous Bearfoot monster truck smashing a row of cars flat, except of course for the stubbornly resistant Volvo wagon?