Strawman Has a Point/Advertising

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Examples of Strawman Has a Point in Advertising include:

• A commercial for Kleenex paper towels (in a tissue-like box and not on a roll) uses a split screen shot of a cloth hand towel and a box of their paper towels, and shows people pulling out towel after towel, and reusing the cloth towel. The implication is that the cloth towel is dirty and gross... but it really ends up making the paper towels look wasteful and environmentally unsound.
• A Russian ad against draft-dodging shows a guy playing videogames all day long in his mother's house while a masculine voice narrates how not joining the army will make you less cool. And if that's not enough, the ad ends with the guy's mother saying:

Mother: Why does he need to join the army anyway? He's a nice guy, he's got a better purpose than that!

• This trope led to one of the biggest advertising mishaps ever: "An unfair comparison between the Mustang and the Javelin." In this 1968 magazine ad, American Motors proudly compared their new Javelin to the Ford Mustang. Aside glossy photos of both cars, the sparse ad copy stressed laughably petty things like "the Mustang's thin blade bumpers don't photograph well" and "our Javelin lists for no more than the Mustang." And the Mustang just plain looked better. To make matters worse, AMC ran the same ad for their Ambassador (vs. the Rolls-Royce), the Rambler (vs. the popular Volkswagen Beetle), and two other cars. So not only did AMC spend millions of dollars on slick, effective ads that made their competitors' cars look better, they did so to their entire product line. See the Javelin ad here ^{[dead link]}.
• A car commercial attempting to advertise itself on the concept of creativity and "thinking differently" has the narrator talking about how his mother let him play with dolls and bought him a sewing machine, daring to break gender roles. The problem? The narrator takes Camp Gay Up to Eleven. To a parent struggling with such concepts, the commercial basically says "Reinforce your son's masculinity or he'll turn into a lisping fairy!"
• An insurance commercial had a woman talking about buying a new car, driving it home, and promptly smashing it into a tree. Her insurance company then had the audacity to raise her rates... except, you know, anyone who would drive a new car off the lot and immediately wrap it around a tree is what is called a "bad risk" in the insurance industry, and every insurance company would raise her rates over it. Yes, even the one being advertised, most likely they'd just do it by some more indirect method.
  • In fact, this insurance company's commercials are riddled with this... most of its commercials seem to betray an intrinsic lack of understanding about how insurance actually works. In actuality they're attempting to prey on customers who don't understand insurance... but they wind up making it look like they don't know what they're doing.

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