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HP Slate & Sex and the City 2 are Confusing People

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Yesterday a friend told me that she and her friends thought it was really cool that the Sex and the City girls were going to be using iPads in Sex and the City 2. . She told me to keep an eye out for the Sex and the City 2 ads that showed Sarah Jessica Parker using an iPad. I told her that couldn’t be accurate because HP’s the movie’s tech sponsor. She insisted that the iPad was going to be in the upcoming chick flick.

Well, sure enough I saw the HP & Sex and the City 2 ad on TV last night. In a flash I understood where my friend’s confusion was coming from. In the  TV commercial, which you can view here, Sarah Jessica Parker does interact with slate devices, but they’re not iPads and they’re not HP tablets. Instead they’re some mythical computer-generated device that’s not for sale and can easily be mistaken for an iPad. In another promo (screen grab above), they do briefly show the HP Hurricane and I can completely understand why most people would think it’s an iPad.

I imagine that HP would’ve liked to have its real slate ready in time for the Sex and The City 2 premier, but then they had to go and buy Palm and figure out how to get WebOS running on it. Average consumers, who HP’s presumably trying to reach with these ads, don’t know anything about the HP Slate or that it’s going to be released as the Hurricane. Instead, they assume that the actress who used Mac notebooks throughout the TV series is using Apple’s latest product…and HP doesn’t mind giving its competitor some free advertising.

Of course nothing on the market looks more like the HP Hurricane than the iPad, so it’s no surprise that fans will spot “iPads” in other pieces of HP/Sex and the City 2 promo material.

This is a lost opportunity for HP to promote its current Tablet PCs and/or the Hurricane.  Since the Hurrican isn’t ready, HP can’t slap a tagline on the end of the commercial or explain what it’s all about. Instead, there’s a promo for HP’s latest notebooks.

There are going to be millions of confused potential PC customers that are decidedly less tech savvy and more fashionable than those of us here at GBM.

If any of you end up seeing this movie, please drop us a line and let me know if the Hurricane gets a cameo.

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. Mike aka C-141xlr

    05/20/2010 at 9:37 pm

    That commercial will be great for selling iPads – fantastic job HP! If viewers catch on that it’s an HP commercial and they are inspired to go look, they will find no such tablet. Then they they will have to pop on over to Apple to find what they were looking for. To the not so well informed, that just looked like an iPad and they MIGHT wonder where HP comes into the picture. But, they will go looking for an iPad because Jessica is using one!

  2. CBONE

    05/20/2010 at 9:37 pm

    Stupid HP. Is a “featuring the HP Hurricane” + product spin too complicated?

  3. RJ

    05/20/2010 at 10:01 pm

    Sadly, Apple with one device has pretty much infected the generally uninformed populace into thinking that any tablet based device is the Ipad. I’ve been using Tablet PCs (Gateway C-120x, Lenovo x-61, & HP TC1100) at coffee houses and life drawing classes for years. And before the Ipad, most people had no clue what a tablet was, and some would ask what kind of computer that was. But Since April 1st…..it just blows my mind just how many people have approached me with “Is that the Ipad?”

    Just this evening I was at a life drawing class, half the class thought I was working on a Ipad. And when I explained it was not the Ipad, and in fact a Tablet PC, the whole class just stared at me blankly. and the instructor shortly afterward went to praise my work and said, “Look at the great work he’s doing, and he’s doing it on an IPAD!”

    Someone just shoot me now.

    • Mike aka C-141xlr

      05/21/2010 at 2:07 am

      The joke would be on them if they went out and bought and iPad and then found out they could only finger-paint.

      I was reading my Kindle in a Dr’s office and a female Dr asked me how I like my iPad. It just goes to show you that dumb is everywhere, and it’s easy to get people to drink the kool-aid.

  4. Scott

    05/21/2010 at 6:13 am

    Hollywood doesn’t do “Reality”

  5. Absolutely NoOne

    05/21/2010 at 6:52 pm

    I spy, with my little eye, Windows Media Player! Not available for the iPad.

  6. L42

    05/25/2010 at 3:03 pm

    Well, wait a minute. If you called someone on the phone and they told you they were drinking a coke, but they had a Shasta(tm) cola in their hand, would you assume that this person was dumb, or rather that coke through a deep history of pervasive and creative branding had earned ownership of the term?

    All businesses want to ‘own’ their respective categories – it’s why people xerox(tm) things, band-aid(tm) their cuts, cool off with a popsicle(tm), check a tv guide(tm), or give a powerpoint(tm).

    Apple is tracking to own the concept ‘tablet’. If they weren’t, that’d be bad brand management and poor business.

    Think about it: for a brief period of time, people were seeing my tablet pc and asking me where I got a ‘color kindle’! We’re a long way from the winner being declared.

  7. G.Younk

    05/30/2010 at 5:46 pm

    Don’t forget Carrie uses in SATC2 her trusty MacBook (or is it a MacBook Pro)? Most people know that (Apple = trendy computing) and will see Carrie use her Mac and think that the tablet is an iPad in the ad.

    This is actually good as the number of HP computer products that come into a Best Buy Geek Squad is the highest ratio for product failures. Modern women need a dependable computing device, this is where Apple comes in.

    No hurricane is in the SATC2 movie. As Palm Web OS is favored by middle aged men (I read this somewhere) no modern woman will want to use that platform.

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