Is this a case of nonverbal false advertising?

Something caught my eye today... something very simple.
There are lots of different ways information can be conveyed to us nonverbally, and here's quite a nice example of how we can be misled by simple images. Check out this screenshot from a recent advert for printer inks:

Who can tell me what's wrong with this?

The voiceover explains how you get an "extra 65% pages" out of their ink cartridges, and a rather helpful image shows us what 65% apparently looks like. However, some of us will be quick to point out that there's something not quite right about this...

Here's what '65% more' actually is... not quite as impressive, is it?

Yes, the first image is very misleading. Although it clearly says "65%" on the advert, the image says something very different - and leads you to think you'll get over 3x more!

This is a simple marketing trick that's actually quite common to see. The verbal information (the "65% more" bit) is stated clearly, but it's the image (the high stack of paper) that's most memorable. Interestingly, our memory of visual information is often better than our memory of verbal information - and, as the concept of "65% more" may be quite ambiguous and difficult to imagine, we're more likely to use the visual information in the image to get the message.

Sneaky, eh?

Watch out for little marketing tricks like this - and don't be fooled yourself!