HP’s Turn to Get Called Out for a Deceptive Ad
by ZetaGecko | 2 Comments | Issues/Problems
Last month, I called Kodak out for trying to grab the moral high ground in printer ink pricing.
An HP employee helped sink the dagger deeper by commenting on that post. Well, now it's HP's turn to get called out.
HP's ad shows 2 peacock's -- the "cheap replacement ink" peacock with a small tail, and the HP ink peacock with a humongous tail. Then it shows two stacks of printed pages. The HP pile is about 4 times as big as the replacement ink pile.
Problem #1 with the ad -- it says that HP inks give you 65% more pages than cheap replacements. Uh, guys. 65% isn't 4 times as much. It's less than twice as much. The visuals in the ad are clearly trying to give the wrong impression.
The second problem is that they're not clear on whether they mean 65% more per dollar, or 65% more per cartridge. For all you know, they could be saying you get 65% more pages out of a cartridge that costs twice as much.
Kodak's ads contained an unimportant factual error and a disingenuous moral high ground grab. But at least they weren't actively deceptive like HP's. Shame, HP. Shame.
March 26th, 2010 at 11:01 am
I was shocked and appalled when I saw HP's deceptive ads too.
What more can we do to get them to stop airing them?
March 26th, 2010 at 11:06 am
Good question, Peter. Call them out on your blog and if you've got an HP printer, buy third-party ink. Other than that, who knows.