Some commercials present a Side-by-Side Demonstration in the form of a contest. Typically it will feature one person who uses the advertised product and has it all together, competing against someone Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket. The "contest" is usually timed, and the person who picked the advertised item will be done in seconds, having time to drink coffee and read the paper while the other person rips out her hair, has children jumping all over her, and endures other distractions.
Now, usually, the product for which the rigged contest is being held is faster or more efficient. (No one wants the FTC or international equivalent sicced on them.) But that's no excuse for having the person who's using the leading competitor be totally incompetent — that's assuming Consumers Are Morons.
When used in advertising, it's similar in spirit to Excuse Question (ads featuring "competitions" that only involve a very easy question to answer for entry).
Examples:
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Fan Works
- Anger Management (TLH): Lori sets the plot into motion when she takes advantage of how she's working at Gus's Games 'n' Grub to rig the raffle so that her brother Lincoln wins.
- Some My Hero Academia fanfics have taken the 'Izuku is dead last in the Quirk Application Test' and made it into a variation where Aizawa purposefully rigged it against Izuku, mostly to make room for Hitoshi.
- In I Refuse to Allow You to Ruin Anymore
, this comes back to bite Aizawa in the ass hard, ending with him being fired by Nezu, and he is later found to have been given a Cruel and Unusual Death by what is assumed to be Stain.
- Prometheus Rising (MHA): Aizawa intentionally doctors Izuku's score to give himself a valid reason to boot him out of UA, even managing to convince Nezu to not allow Power Loader to take him in, causing Power Loader to Resign in Protest. This comes back to bite him in the ass massively.
- A Second Chance (MHA): After hearing Izuku’s story, Din determines that the Quirk Assessment Test was this, and that Aizawa tampered with the scores to ensure he’d have an excuse to expel Izuku no matter how well he did, all on the basis of him being Quirkless.
- Welcome to Class 1-Z: In this one, Aizawa intentionally doctors the scores so he can essentially expel Mineta (whose perversions are toned down due to the emergence of Blackthorn despite Nezu telling him he's barred from doing so), before Blackthorn shuts it down, reveals the real results and warns them that the people Aizawa ruined alongside their grieving families will target them as a Revenge by Proxy.
- In I Refuse to Allow You to Ruin Anymore
- Null and Void (NevaraRaven): The "Heroes Vs. Villains" Exam is deliberately rigged against the "Villain" side. Not only do most students naturally want to join the Heroes, the Villain team is given a list of contradictory rules they're forced to follow. The minimum passing score for them is 80%, and the highest any villain team has scored is 30%. Upon studying the rules, Izuku realizes that it's meant to be more of a test of wits filled with Exact Words and Loophole Abuse.
- The One to Make It Stay: In The Radio Still Plays, it's revealed that Alec Cataldi planned to sabotage Mireille's performance at Summer Sesh, hoping that their humiliation would go viral.
- Rainbow Factory: In the sequel, Rainbow Dash remarks that some of the instructors for the Flight Exam were told to intentionally fail many of the fillies and colts in order to ensure they'd be sent to the titular faculity.
- In The Rigel Black Chronicles, Tom Riddle organizes the "True Triwizard Tournament", touted as an opportunity to finally settle the question of whether muggle-born, half-blood, or pure-blood wizards are superior. Leaving aside the problem of small sample sizes, the Tournament itself was thoroughly albeit subtly rigged to ensure a pure-blood victory, from hand-picking interesting-but-weak muggle-born contestants — or skilled-but-obnoxious ones who alienate the public — to designing judging metrics tailored to the specific strengths of the preferred winner, to putting the favorite in a starting position with less obstacles. Too bad Riddle's chosen winner was "Rigel Black", who's actually half-blood Harriett Potter in disguise.
Krum: Strange tournament ven I come back second and place fourth, no?
- Scarlet Lady: "Stormy Weather" takes an unexpected turn when the titular akuma confronts one of the KIDZ+ vendors who was selling balloons and other merchandise to promote the contestants, and he reveals that they were only asked to make merch for Mireille. This leads to the revelation that Alec rigged the contest in Mireille's favor, believing an engineered Landslide Election would be more dramatic.
- A Student Out of Time: Sato's audition to be deemed the "Ultimate Archer" and admitted into Hope's Peak is ridiculously rigged against her, as she's given fifty arrows and told she has just one minute to score 300 points. Archery competitions typically allow thirty seconds per arrow, and as of 2023, the Guinness World Record for shooting ten arrows is 39.53 seconds. In other words, she was presented with a physically impossible test.
- In Vow of Nudity, When Spectra asks to transition from prostitute work to something that'd let her develop her magic ability, her boss challenges her to hit a faraway target at his archery range to prove she's ready. After she fails, she learns later that he gave her an arrow with a magnetized tip that repels away from the target, meaning she had no chance of winning.
Literature
- The Great Brain: In one book, Tom gets several other boys to weed sections of the garden for him by saying that there is a dollar hidden in there. They pick by Drawing Straws, but Tom rigs it with the first boy to draw a straw so that he'll find the dollar but will give it back to Tom afterward in exchange for a smaller amount of money that is a more than fair price for weeding a quarter of the garden.
- I Hate That We're Childhood Friends!: Rua ordered her servants to sabotage Amane so that she won't upstage her. Thankfully, Kazuma quickly took them out, allowing Amane to win.
- Both So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams and The Unadulterated Cat by Terry Pratchett refer to pet food adverts in which the rival brands have been doused with motor oil. Both Arthur Dent's friend's dog and Pratchett's "Real Cat" pick the wrong one anyway; the dog out of stupidity and the cat out of bloody-mindedness.
- Through My Eyes: In kindergarten, Ruby and many other black children took a test to find out which children would qualify to attend white schools. It was made very hard on purpose, so if all of them failed, the white school board would use it as an excuse to keep the schools segregated. She and four other girls passed.
Live-Action TV
- Victorious: In "Freak the Freak Out", Jade and Cat discover the contests at Karaoke Dokie are rigged for the Alpha Bitches Hayley and Tara to always win despite the other contestants getting more applause than them, because Hayley is the daughter of the club's owner. The girls then challenge Hayley and Tara to another contest with a non-rigged rule where the winner is decided by the most applause.
Magazines
- In a February issue of Cricket magazine, Ladybug is holding a Valentine's Day spelling bee where the prize is a trophy full of chocolate and a kiss from her. She wants Cricket to win, so she gives the others hard words, while giving Cricket words like "hug" and "sweet," or otherwise finding any reason to disqualify the other bugs, like eliminating Pudding for spelling "color" with a "u." On the final round, she asks Cricket to spell the word "love." When he balks, she asks him to spell "it," but Ugly Bird shows up, spells "i-t," and demands the prize. Ladybug promptly runs away.
Video Games
- Evil Genius (2004): This is how you get the Super Agent and Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy Jet Chan out of your hair. After capturing and interrogating his old master, Jet Chan is fed a meal laced with sedatives and unquestionably defeated subsequently, breaking his spirit.
- Metaphor: ReFantazio: The official Tournament for the Throne, hosted by the Senate. While due to magic the crown will go to whoever has the most public support, the tournament itself is meant to be an official way for candidates to present their platform and skills to the public, but in practice, it is a way to enforce one of their own's claim to the throne, the leader of the Sanctum Church, Sanctifex Forden. The tournament is even used as a way to enforce Sanctism to the public by making one of the challenges to take Divine Relics from the Mustari people so that they can re-write history to be that the relics always belonged to the church instead of the Mustari.
Western Animation
- The Flintstones episode "In the Dough" has Fred and Barney pose as their wives in a baking competition sponsored by Tasty Pastry flour when said wives are sick. However, it turns out that it's actually one of these; Fred and Barney make the tastiest cake, but when it turns out the "Brand B" flour they used wasn't Tastry Pastry, they're disqualified (with the revelation immediately afterwards that they weren't the real Betty and Wilma just meaning they have no grounds to argue).
Real-Life
- Burger King ran a series of ads where they had people in different countries try both a Whopper and a Big Mac with the people who had picked the Whopper appearing in the ad. The problem? Many of the countries were poverty stricken and did not mine and eat meat.
- Coke versus Pepsi. Pepsi frequently run ads that have side-by-side blind taste tests, the results being people preferred Pepsi. And while they do cite their research, the problem is with the study is inherently flawed. Pepsi is the sweeter of the two, and in a sip-type test, people will go for Pepsi. When Coke ran their own test, using full serving-size amounts, Coke won.
- A particularly annoying example in a Kindle ad attempted to demonstrate the Kindle was easier to read on than an iPad...an iPad with the brightness turned all the way down.
- Monster Cable received some nasty PR when it was discovered in their "See the Monster Cable difference" HDMI cable demo in electronic shops, the Monster Cable TV had an HDMI cable, the other TV had a composite video cable.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic pulled this with their "Who is Twilight Sparkle's BFF" contest. Viewers were asked to vote on either Princess Celestia or Starlight Glimmer, and the winner would be featured in back-to-back episodes. Of course, Princess Celestia has only had two episodes to begin with, "Celestial Advice" and "A Royal Problem", both of which heavily featured (read: debatably starred) Starlight Glimmer. As fans waited six whole seasons to finally get said Princess Celestia episodes, they were lightning quick in pointing this out.
- Rogers Canada has the infamous commercial showing a clueless customer who is using the competition. The picture on their screen is lower-res than standard definition, and stretched to the point that everything was twice as wide as it should be. Basically it tried to scare customers into thinking that Bell's HD was considerably worse than regular TV. In reality they're identical quality.
- Vanguard Mutual Funds has aired a couple of these to symbolize their no-load mutual funds versus the competition's loaded funds. There's one with two hurdlers racing, and Vanguard's hurdles are much lower than the competition. Then there's the toy tugboat race in which a giant hand keeps putting little boxes on the competitor's tugboat...
- It wasn't exactly a contest, but there was a Volvo commercial that featured the enormous Bearfoot monster truck smashing a row of cars flat, except of course for the stubbornly resistant Volvo wagon. It was revealed afterwards that they reinforced the Volvo in order to survive the multiple takes necessary when filming a commercial.