Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

I’ve always been intrigued by hand wash soap ads that claim their product kills “99.9%” of germs. Why not say 100? Is the 0.1% really going to come back to bite the brand if people get sick while using their hand wash? I believe it would take a very complex study to ever prove causality.

Ads for educational products and institutes utilise this trope too. They give the impression that 99.9% of the students that use them will achieve their goals, ace the exam, get the job. In reality, the success rate is quite a bit… slimmer. 

Educational institutes have hard-sold aspiration and doubled down on the axiom that “learning is fun”. Offline, traditional businesses used scarcity as a marketing tool: enroll your kids now so that they have a shot at winning the few spots available (at whichever ‘premium’ institution was being advertised for). Online, the scale and complexity of this message only deepened. Edtechs pressed the FOMO nerve with every new product—test-prep, K-12, coding, jobs, skills—and were over-enthusiastic with their promises.

But as hard it is to live this era down, Indian edtech ads, for the most part, look different now.