There is only one rule in advertising. It is not all right when you imply something in your marketing messages which you know to be incorrect. In other words, it is not OK to lie. This is something that the Chinese electronics giant Huawei learnt the hard way. Huawei is trying to promote its P9 smartphone. The P9 is arguably, one of the most anticipated phones to have been launched recently, because of its dual-camera system which was co-developed with Leica.
Both the cameras are 12 megapixel. However, while one shoots in color the other shoots in monochrome. It is said that this unique system produces a far greater contrast than is possible with traditional single camera systems. Ok. So much for information about the phone and its cameras. What the problem has been is to do wit the marketing messages. In a recent post on their Google+ page Huawei published a photo which they captioned,
We managed to catch a beautiful sunrise with Deliciously Ella. The #HuaweiP9’s dual Leica cameras makes taking photos in low light conditions like this a pleasure. Reinvent smartphone photography and share your sunrise pictures with us. #OO
However, what they seem to have missed is that Google+ published the EXIF data of a photo when it is posted. This is what the EXIF details says according to Android Police,
Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark III
Lens EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM
Oops! That’s what we thought too when we saw the EXIF details. But really, Huawei how could you?
Huawei has since removed the post and issued an apology to The Verge,
It has recently been highlighted that an image posted to our social channels was not shot on the Huawei P9. The photo, which was professionally taken while filming a Huawei P9 advert, was shared to inspire our community. We recognize though that we should have been clearer with the captions for this image. It was never our intention to mislead. We apologize for this and we have removed the image.
It is one thing to post-process an image and make it look good, but a completely different thing when you imply (even if it was not an explicitly mentioned) that an image was made by a certain camera when it was not.
Rajib Mukherjee
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