Entertainment

Are Pick Five ads true? Not a ‘Little Bit’

These days, there’s one preferred way to get your commercial message across on TV: lie.

Gosh, we’ve enjoyed those ads for FreeScoreCredit.com and FreeCreditReport.com, starring a hapless musical band of young men forced to accept low-paying jobs in odd places due, somehow, to their ignorance about their credit standing.

Both companies are owned by Experian Marketing Direct, from which the FTC in 2005 retrieved $950,000 in “ill-gotten gains.” Despite the repeated use of the word, “free,” a call to either “free credit score” company is attached to the inescapable aroma of a boiler room operation.

For example, the first thing the phone rep wants is a credit card number.

Credit card? For what? What happened to free?

“Free,” in this case begins with a $20 charge to take the next step — to learn one’s credit rating, if such info, once provided, is legit.

Then, unless one calls to cancel calls to insist removal as a client — one will be billed $20 per month. This is known to marketers and scam artists as a “negative option,” and it’s designed to sucker the naïve and those too busy to pay careful attention to their bills.

Lately, those New York Lottery ads for its “Take Five” game, starring that pint-sized bald fella, Little Bit O’ Luck, have returned to local TV. These commercials are infested with bogus come-ons, also known as lies.

The ads claim that “the odds of winning are one-in-nine” and that there are “over 100,000 winners daily.”

Both lies.

The odds of winning a cash payout is roughly 115-1 and that payout is around $27. The vast majority of the “over 100,000 winners daily” not only haven’t won a penny nor have they broken even. They’ve lost money.

Take Five counts among its “winners” those who “win” another chance. One can’t even get his/her money back for such a “win;” they can only “win” another chance to cash a ticket at 115-1 odds, thus a huge percentage of those “100,000 daily winners” are actually losers.

New York State has been promoting, running and profiting from this con for the last five years. Isn’t that nice? And when we stop to consider that the poorest neighborhoods produce a disproportionately high take from lottery and scratch-off sales. . .

Recent small-type TV disclaimers within ads and infomercials have begun to include graphics that read “results not typical.” If you look quickly and closely, you can read it on commercials for instant weight-loss products, family ancestry tracking services and miracle health enhancers.

So the question becomes this: If everything’s on the up-and-up, why not show “typical results”?

Of course, vulnerable TV viewers are the most vulnerable. But who needs protection more than they?

* * *

Hulk Hogan, the steroid-built, pro-wrestling, kiddie hero of those now in their 20s and early 30s, appeared last week on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to speak soulfully about the mistakes he made as a family man and how he is rebuilding his life financially and as a father and husband. Very touching.

And at the end of the interview, co-host Robin Roberts, likely as a quid pro quo, noted that Hogan now has his own truTV show, “Micro Championship Wrestling.”

Roberts lends her name, voice and position to many socially sensitive issues and enterprises. But does she know what Hogan’s up to, what she promoted?

Micro Championship Wrestling is what was once called “midget wrestling.” It died a natural death because it really was nothing better than a sad spectacle for desensitized lunkheads, an antiquated carnival side show, what we once indelicately called a “freak show.” But it seems that’s okay with “GMA.”