'Everything is fair in love and war' goes an old adage.  The same must also apply for advertisements, going by the sheer number of their ridiculous claims, mind-numbing stretching of truth and their forays with blatant lies.  However, they are not all the same.  Some of them use cunning and ingenuity to gain an edge while others simply count on the stupidity of their audience to do the trick.  Some of those tricks are pulled to circumvent laws of the land.  When Sunny Deol stars in an ad purportedly selling 'club soda',  you know exactly what it is a surrogate ad for.  When a toothpaste company says their product has 'extra calcium shakti',  you know that the extra calcium will only help if you eat the toothpaste instead of using it to brush your teeth with, but that's you!  They count on the ad fooling the majority of the people.

My friend Pankaj Jangid had shared a photograph on Twitter.  It was a pie chart, showing a car model's share of the market, in comparison with it's competitors' products.  Pankaj had mentioned "Do your math, in the pie chart, and check how accurate #hyundai mechanics is :p" I decided to not only do the math, but also to plot the numbers in a pie chart to see for myself how true it was. My finding? Hyundai was being ingenious in their attempt to fool the public. Let me show you how:

Here's the picture of the ad.  Beneath this picture is a picture of the graph that I've plotted, based on the figures in the ad.  Observe the two for a moment.

Did you see them carefully? If you did, you'll observe that the two graphs are exactly identical! Don't think so? Look again. Look at the slices depicting the market shares of the other cars in both the graphs as they are easier to relate to, because of how the image is angled. When I first saw the graph and the numbers, I was convinced that the car maker in question had distorted the graph, fudging the sizes of the sectors, giving themselves a 'bigger' sector than one which was mathematically accurate, but when I actually plotted the figures and compared the graphs, I discovered that they'd not done that at all. By merely changing the graph style to 3D from 2D and angling it in a certain way and increasing the extent of 'exploding' their sector, they made their market share appear bigger. See how they show absolute numbers in the graph and not percentages? That's deliberate too. Their actual market share is slightly over 31%, according to their figures, but to a person who casually looks at the graph in the ad, he would think that their share is much bigger. One might even think that it's only slightly lesser than fifty percent! Ingenious bastards!