Does the unappealing ad above look familiar? It’s appeared on websites everywhere, including The Guardian, MSNBC, Facebook, and of course, /Film. The ad has racked up billions upon billions of impressions in the past couple of years, and it turns out, the story behind it as just as unappealing as the illustration itself:
The innocent-seeming “1 Tip” ad is actually the tip of something much larger: a vast array of diet and weight-loss companies hawking everything from pills made from African mangoes to potions made from exotic acai berries. Federal officials have alleged that the companies behind the ads make inflated claims about their products and use deceptive means to market them.