During my ride with the train today I had the chance to discover once more how foolish some advertisers must be. Today's example comes from HP, well known manufacturer of different IT devices. Among the devices they sell also relatively cheap / affordable notebooks (but also some high end devices).
However - I had to discover an advertisement in the current edition of a Swiss Weekend Magazine called "20 Minuten Friday", which is freely distributed at the train stations and covers different topics (mostly about fashion and glamour talk). Because they are lying around everywhere in the trains on the weekends I scan this magazine every weekend and read some articles from it.
And there it was - one of the most stupid advertisements I as an IT-Pro have ever seen in the last few weeks! But look for yourself at the picture below:
What went wrong with this ad?
I can tell you: They recommend you to use Windows Vista on their new personal notebooks, which you can style to your taste.
This would not be that harmful if not the whole world is talking about the new Windows 7. It has not been released officially yet (it will release on Octobre 7th), but it is already shipping with some new notebooks or you can download it. And it runs faster.
So in the time where everyone is talking about Windows 7, since Vista has been not such a big success and XP is really outdated by now, HP is doing an ad campaign to promote Windows Vista.
*Do you take us customers all for fools?!"
I hope not. But this is a really bad advertisement campaign. Even if there are promoted notebooks for private users and not for IT-Pros, but still. To impose the companies will in this way on the customer is not the best way to build up trust for a long lasting customer lifecycle and possible upgrades or up-sellings. Even if the hardware is or looks good.
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