You're Doing it Wrong: The FTC's Animated Consumer Video

If you want to educate someone — what’s the best way to go about it?

Something visual, maybe? How about a video that opens with bright rom-commy music (the kind that shows that, even though the residents of the sleepy burg of Sweet Valley may have their differences, everyone still works together when it matters and a slow dance in the kitchen will probably lead to love between the two unlikely protagonists), lists a bunch of rhetorically redundant facts (Where does the sun rise? What happens to something that goes up? What follows day?), and includes animation that displays all the skill you’d expect from a work-release program?

Uh, no. No: that’s actually not the way to educate your audience; that’s the way to pander and condescend to your audience. And yet, as you can see below, that’s exactly how the FTC decided to roll with this consumer education video:

Yes, we all need to remember that consumers have rights. What we don’t need is the terrifyingly distended jaw that starts around the :45 mark or the weird underground bunker that lady appears trapped in under that one guy’s mailbox (:47).

The one thing this animation does well, though (so that this isn’t “pile on the FTC’s poorly made video” day), is state several times that one’s rights as a consumer do not include forgiveness/forgetness (it’s my own creation) of the debt owed — something that isn’t always apparent when reading consumer-friendly message boards and sites.

(But seriously: how does she even get to her office?)