Abstract
A variety of legal issues can arise when a television commercial is alleged to constitute “misleading or deceptive conduct” in contravention of section 52 of the Trade Practices Act or equivalent legislation. One of these issues is whether the commercial conveys the implied claim that is alleged to be false.
Researchers in the field of consumer psychology have devised a variety of tests of the implied claims conveyed by a television commercial. However none of these researchers has shown that their test provides evidence that a judge would find persuasive.
This paper describes a method of assessing the weight that test results might be accorded in legal proceedings. The method involves an experiment in which 45 barristers are asked to predict the outcome of nine hypothetical court cases. Being hypothetical, no inference is intended that any company's advertising might be misleading or deceptive. The method is used to assess the impact of tests in which a representative sample of the viewing public is asked to respond to written questions after watching the commercial in a movie theatre.
The study shows that this type of test could provide highly persuasive evidence in legal proceedings of the implied claims in a television commercial.
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