And people complained about MY Venn diagrams!

These ads for some service called Speck apparently ran recently in New York. I’m sure New Yorkers have more important things to worry about right now, but I thought I’d catch the rest of you all up on this ad, which completely mangles the very concept of the Venn diagram to a far greater degree than I ever could.

Speck ad: Venn diagram of three circles labeled 'People who live in SoHo', 'People who live in NoHo', and 'People who can afford their rent', with the Speck logo in the triple overlap.

Copyranter has more. Apparently the entire ad campaign is predicated on making three mutually exclusive categories and saying their service, Speck, is for people who are in the overlap between them. When people got annoyed, their response was apparently “lol we’re dumb.” Yeah, I have to say that advertising a service as being for exactly zero people isn’t the best way to sell your service.

Okay, in THIS case, Speck might be for the super-rich people who own two houses in two separate districts of town, and can afford them both. That’s still not exactly defining a huge niche for your product.

(Inb4 trolls saying “they’re still better than yours!”)

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And people complained about MY Venn diagrams!
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10 thoughts on “And people complained about MY Venn diagrams!

  1. 1

    They’re still bett…
    .
    .
    .

    I can’t do it. They’re just terrible. Ad agency out of business terrible. Maybe the hurricane will do something good and clean up that filth.

  2. 4

    Well, technically, the *three* shouldn’t overlap, but the two “Live Ins” should significantly overlap with the “Afford Rent” one. And Speck was trying to say that their “nice” was all of that “afford rent” category. (Or maybe they’re claiming they’re also for providing service to people who *can’t* afford it, given their tagline…)

    Nevertheless, it seems they meant to put the asterisk in the union of all three circles anyway, rather than their (empty) intersection. Lol they’re dumb.

  3. 9

    It’s a valid diagram of a type I’ve actually drawn, that says what they want to say, just not a Venn diagram.

    If you consider each labeled circle to contain the common properties of individuals in the named group, it’s saying that everybody in each of those groups has the property (*), which apparently means they’re somebody the case is for.

    Such diagrams can be useful for things like designing classification systems or inheritance hierarchies in computer programs, and for clarifying certain logical principles… but I have no idea what they’re called.

    It could be they misremembered how Venn diagrams work, and accidentally reinvented that other kind of diagram.

    Or maybe they had no coherent idea what they were doing, and it’s just coincidence. That’s remotely possible, I suppose.

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