Chartjunk as marketing copy

I got some spam marketing message last week. How exciting. They even use a subject line that has absolutely nothing to do with its content, baiting me to open it. And open I did, to some data graphics horrors.

The marketer promises a whole series of charts to prove that art is a great asset class for investment returns.

The very first chart already caught my full attention. It's this one:

It's a simple bar chart, with four values. Looks innocuous.

I'm unable to appreciate the recent trend to align bars in the middle, rather than at their bases. So I converted it to the canonical form:

Do you see the problem?

The second value ($1.7 trillion) is exactly half the size of the first value ($3.4 trillion) and yet the second bar is two-thirds of the length of the first bar. So, the size of the second bar is exaggerated relative to its label – and that’s the bar displaying the market size for “art,” which is what the spammer is pitching.

The bottom pair of values share the same relationship: $0.8 trillion is exactly half of $1.6 trillion. Again, the relative lengths of those two bars are not 50% but slightly over 60%.

Did the designer think that the bar lengths could be customized to whatever s/he desires? This one is hard to crack.

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The sixth chart in the series is a different kind of puzzle:

All three lines have the exact same labels but show different values over time.

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And they have pie charts, of course. Take a look:

Something went wrong here too. I'll leave it to my readers who can certainly figure it out :)

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These charts were probably spammed to at least thousands.