I am of the opinion that the very concept of commissioned sales is cancerous, because of the obvious perverse incentives it sets up. Whenever I am forced to buy form commissioned salespeople (car, furniture/mattress, insurance, interacting with an 'advisor' at my bank), I can never take that salesperson's advice at face value. I always wonder if I'm the mark in some institutionalized or just regular straight-up con. I will (and sometimes do) pay extra to avoid the feeling of needing a shower after such 'interactions'.

Advertising fraud is already illegal. The situations where case law dictates what is illegal are varied and nuanced. As a side note, there are many categories of claims that fall in neither "provably true" nor "provably untrue", and enforcing upon these claims is tricky.

You can google for "advertising fraud precedent" "advertising fraud case law" and "advertising fraud case studies" for more information.

> Advertising fraud is already illegal.

Yeah, OK. But here's what happens if a company gets publicly caught. "At ConCo we take ethics seriously. The statements by the employees in question are not in line with ConCo's policies and practices. Those employees will be burned alive, then put on a personal improvement plan, and then their heads will be displayed on pikes at their respective places of employment."

I think punishing or firing the employees is appropriate. It is often, but not always, also appropriate for those employees to have criminal punishments imposed on them.

I suppose you think that current norms for these punishments are too lax. It's not easy to tell what you actually believe though. If you want to tease out your own actual beliefs on this, look up some advertising fraud cases and find one that was punished too loosely, and find one that was punished too severely.

Right... That’s why you have an “unlimited” data plan that is “guaranteed” or it’s “free”...

There is no such thing as truth in advertising. There is only a Make Lawyers Rich lawsuit..

Don't those unlimited plans state that data may be throttled, etc? Unless you cite a specific example it's pretty tough to argue against.

To argue against your theoretical case: If there is a data plan that advertises unlimited data without giving any fine print describing the throttling behavior, or other strange details after high data usage, then yes, they should be able to have false advertising claims pressed against them successfully.

Come on. In theory, with "unlimited" legal resources, you can take such matters to trial and onward to a victory...

What mechanism other than litigation and the consumer protection bureau do you think should enforce against false advertising? How much resources should be expended to fight it? Do you have an alternative to propose, or do you prefer instead to attack a known-to-be-imperfect system?

Often there is fine print explaining the terms. You have to read it, though.

No. These are words and phrases that hold literal meanings. They are used by advertisers to deceive people. There are/is no fine print in broadcast or digital ads. Except in Pharma... which is only allowed to advertise in the US and NZ. No where else on earth allows pharmaceutical advertising on TV.

Sometimes the meaning can be different between the literal or regulatory defined meaning and what people assume or expect.

The USDA's minimum for "free range" labeling for example for non-certified organic foods can be met with a standard chicken coop with a door and a few feet of screened in porch the chickens may or may not ever actually use. "No Hormones" on the other hand has the technical definition and the layman definition aligned, but is federally mandated anyway making it a meaningless feature.

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-does-free-range-really-me...

Yes, and then there's the advertising get-out-of-jail-free card of "puffery". You can lie all you want in your marketing materials as long as your lawyers can convince a judge that no reasonable person would actually believe what you said.

It's this kind of of nonsense that led me to consider all marketing messages and claims to be lies by default.

> Meta point: do we have to accept deception as a necessary part of sales? It seems strange that we accept deception and manipulation as necessary ingredients in the market, and that its on the buyer when they "get duped".

I guess I would clarify what you mean by deception. One of the key parts of sales, at least when it comes to technical sales, is that an answer to a question or a presentation of capabilities needs to be made in a context. You have to know your audience. When you're talking about how your software does authentication it's absolutely appropriate to describe it as "integrating into your existing investments in authentication" when speaking to the business side of the audience. This is compared to going into detail (e.g. NTLM, Basic, SAML, Kerberos, OIDC, JWT, whatever) when speaking to the technical side of the audience. Is the generic answer to the business side deceptive? I don't see how it is. It's not their role to analyze the technical merits. They just want to know how much extra work will it require, in general, to deploy the software.

Is outright lying necessary? No. I've only been on the sales (technical sales, but nonetheless sales) side of the world for 1.5 years, but no, you don't. I am fortunate that my manager has carved out a team where the _expectation_ is that we are technical stewards of our customers. Obviously our end goal is selling software, but the immediate goal is to make the software work. It's a norm on our team that it's entirely acceptable to join a call and tell the customer that a competitor would be better suited for the use case.

While it's not necessary, it is hard. The incentives for sales aren't aligned with telling the truth. But this is where culture matters quite a bit.

"do we have to accept deception as a necessary part of sales?" I would like to think "no", but as someone who's worked building a technical product, which is then turned around and sold, it's hard not to feel like portraying your work in the best possible light, combined with moderately effective sales techniques, leaves the buyer with a strictly inaccurate impression of what the products capabilities are.

I'm not okay with saying these situations are unavoidable, but I think they arise pretty naturally out of situations where people are paid to make a sale, and people hear what they want to hear.

> But couldn't we have a standard where literally anything anyone says to a customer must be true, or was not false to the knowledge of the person saying it?

This would be hard to prove beyond existing rules, and what would you do about opinionated statements?

Further, this is one of those standards that cuts both ways but people only see it when they're the ones suing.

I want to prevent consumer pain due to bad sales practices, but I also appreciate that the burden of proof required means that it would be harder for someone to sue me into bankruptcy for speaking my mind at some point.

"Anything anyone says to a customer must be true" is difficult. "Anything the consumer signs must be true" is a much better, and easier to enforce method in my opinion. There's a long way to go on plain language there (and people can and have already tested enforceability) but it's a much clearer standard. (Not a lawyer, just a citizen)

That standard exists already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescission_(contract_law)