If there is one thing that is going to turn off a potential buyer, it's being lied to in the first place. When you start off a business relationship with a lie, it sours the whole deal, even if the ultimate deal ends up a good one.
I remember seeing similar crap on the ads for the dating site True. There some hot chick would pretend to be writing on her lap top while lying on the bed scantily clad. The ad was designed to make you click to 'chat' with her, when in all reality she wasn't real. It's a strange kind of advertising for a site claiming to weed out cheats and liars from its clientele.
In recent times, the latest trend is geo specific ads based on the location of your IP address. You see ads like "Conroe Mom invents new product." Or maybe, "Important message for Texas residents." It's a pathetic attempt to appear local and therefore relevant. After all, is some local mom from my community really going to rip me off?
It just bugs me to think that a company would stoop so low to create a sale that they would lie like this to get a click though. The first time I saw this was some multi level marketing / pyramid scheme, where a web page personalized to your home town would appear, talking about a local man in his 20s who was making tens of thousands of dollars a week from his chosen scheme.
Now it seems slightly more mainstream products are jumping on this bandwagon, and they really need to stop and think what they are doing.
No matter how stupid you think your target audience is, and no matter how smug an executive you might be, the vast majority of people are going to see this bullshit for what it is. So the question is, are the few suckers you attract like this going to be enough to sustain your business? And if so, maybe you are a crook and not a businessman.
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