Here’s something that winds me up. This is a graph that was published to accompany a high-profile hardware launch last year. I won’t name names, but you can probably guess who produced it and what they were trying to show:

As you can see, across various tests the red bar is three, four, even six times as tall as the green one. But hold on — because that’s not an accurate reflection of relative performance.

You’ve probably already spotted the reason why: the Y axis doesn’t start at zero! Instead, it originates at a rather arbitrary 0.8, greatly exaggerating the difference in scale between the green and red bars. A more neutral representation of the same figures would see the red team still win, but by a decidedly less jaw-dropping margin:

Of course, skipping over part of an axis can sometimes be justified. If you’re charting small changes in large numbers, it makes sense to zoom in a little, just for the sake of clarity. But here the graph isn’t intended to illustrate a trend: it’s supposed to convey, at a glance, just how much bigger one set of numbers is than another. And that’s precisely what it doesn’t do.

Don’t think I’m picking on any one company here: this type of spin is part and parcel of marketing, in the IT business and beyond. And to be honest, I rather enjoy the mental work-out of decoding official PR messages to get to the truth. It just irks me that they think we’re that gullible.

What’s the most shameless marketing claim you’ve come across?