Thursday, November 22, 2012
Math and advertising
Over at the informative All About Advertising Law blog from Venable, the authors ask "what does a lifetime supply really mean?" They describe one calculation method that, as described, seems obviously wrong to me: "For the Gumball.com promotion, the company took the average life
expectancy of a U.S. citizen, subtracted it by 18 (the minimum age of
entry) and multiplied the difference by 365, representing one gumball
per day." Though the US is a low infant-mortality nation and the final number doesn't differ much, the proper calculation is life expectancy at age 18, which isn't the same as life expectancy at age 0 - 18. Science is the lawyers' friend!
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1 comment:
I wonder what they would say about the question that always troubled me: is bequeathing someone a chocolate factory really the same thing as giving him a lifetime supply of chocolate?
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