The article is claiming that it looks like the site that is using Paypal (as opposed to Paypal itself) is the one that is calling Paypal "The safer, easier way to pay." To build on your analogy, if there was an independent site that provided links to news stories, and the Fox logo was designed to look as follows:
which one is the average visitor more likely to click? In this case, Fox has designed its logo to look as though the independent site is saying that Fox is "fair and balanced." If someone else appears to be endorsing Fox, it's much more likely to sway opinion. That's the whole point of the article.
I take issue with the word "stupid" being used this way to refer to the masses in design discourse.
People don't have to be stupid to be manipulated in the way the author suspected; it just takes being busy, having a specific goal that one wants to realize (buy software) and focusing on it, and not being particularly interested in the internal implementation details of the mechanism of manipulation.
Well, point taken - I think most people today, aren't naive enough to take these messages at face value.
As marketeers become more sophisticated, and choose to employ more devious methods of swaying opinion - the ability of the general population to successfully decode these messages improves.
Take a look at some advertising messages from the 50s, or some propaganda posters from the first or second world war - their messages wouldn't hit home today (unless they're served together with a liberal dose of irony).
Do you know how many people get taken in by phishing scams every day? Do you know how many people blindly click the top result for the search "facebook login" and assume it is Facebook's login page even when it's on a different domain? Do you know how many people even know what a Web browser is?
The answers to the above questions are, respectively: "A lot," "A huge number" and "Less than 8%, according to a Google survey."
Right; and the people in the "What is a browser?" video [1] are not stupid; they're busy, have adapted very well to the extreme compartmentalization of 21st century Westernized life and knowledge, and are largely uninterested in what we know as computing. To invoke a central theme of "Paradox of the Active User" [2]: they're all experts in one field or another, and would make many a hacker here look like someone who doesn't know what something as supposedly generic as a "browser" is in their respective fields. That's far from "stupid".
You could replace a good 80% of the instances of "stupid" with "busy" in design discussions, and you'd end up with better discussions.
It's a rule I called 'Processed Cheddar Cheese Food'.
When I worked at McDonalds (1st year of university) the cheese slices for the burgers were delivered in a box marked 'Processed Cheddar Cheese Food Product'. I built the rule then and there: If you have to say it's food, it probably isn't.
I now apply that in the business world. Got a slogan that says 'We're the best' or 'Fair and Balanced'? Processed Cheddar Cheese Food.
There is a fine line. Sometimes you need to make a statement of this nature. A sniff test (bs detector) usually helps in borderline cases. If you even have to ask whether the rule applies, it probably does.
All "American Cheese" of that type is labeled this way. Check any package at the supermarket, from Kraft to the house brand. The phrasing is likely an FDA requirement of some type.
