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Nokia Apologizes For Misleading Lumia 920 Ad
hypnosec writes "During Nokia's press event for the launch of its flagship Windows Phone 8 smartphone — the Lumia 920 — the Finnish company made available some promotional materials wherein there was a video showcasing PureView's main feature: optical image stabilization (OIS) but, it turns out these ads were faked following which Nokia has issued an official apology. In the video was 'a reflection that revealed the footage wasn't shot on a Lumia 920, but a regular camera inside a white van.' If we go to 0:27 of the video, a reflection of a white van keeping pace with the girl is seen whereby a person is holding a DSLR camera. Fast forward to 0:48 of the video and you will clearly see the shadow of a DSLR hooked to the swing. In its apology through a blog post Nokia confirms that the video 'was not shot with a Lumia 920.'"
A better option would have been to avoid publishing misleading ads...
Advertisement is full of lies. Who'd have thought? Colour me shocked. Shocked, I say!
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Next you'll be saying that that HTC (?) ad with the fashion photographer jumping out of the plane and doing a photo shoot in free-fall wasn't entirely shot on a smartphone?
What next? I'd been planning on buying a can of Red Bull, sprouting wings, and flying to Holland next week: should I change my travel plans?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Who would have ever guessed!?
you guys don't understand... the option to stabilize the picture comes with a van!
Buy a Lumia 920 and get the girl in the ad. Pretty sure that will sweep this whole DSLR nonsense under the rug and score them a new Slashdot user base.
Move house and stop cheating on Laura
The camera shots are fake as well as the videos...
for the brits among you, there's a fantastic skit along just these lines in the latest episode of The Revolution Will Be Televised, which was on last night on BBC3
Nokia should have sacked marketing instead of sacking their engineers....anyway, what do you need engineers (especially all those patent producing, producting building experienced guys in Finland) for?
Contrast this with the demo for Google Glass -- done live, with multiple people, skydiving.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7TB8b2t3QE
I have to assume it's only mentioned (repeatedly!) to gin up racial resentment of some sort.
Also, on the grassy knoll, you can see the outline of a figure that looks exactly like Steve Ballmer.
I know when I'm looking for a high end phone, I look for stuck up douchebags saying customers are wrong about wanting an SD slot as that would ruin their artistic vision and who create a fake ad for no reason about a fake feature then "accidentally" release it. I think maybe they're purposely trying to not get bought out by any other company by looking like assholes.
...by such an obvious fake. We promise that in the future, the misleading ads won't be *nearly* as easy to debunk.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Unless the commercial explicitly says something like "shot with a real Lumia 920", I really don't see this as a bad sin. If they could use other tools to show the consumer what the OIS feature is about, that's fine. There's a lot of stuff that is "faked" in advertisements anyway.
That commercial was not intended to be treated as a factual statement of the phone's capabilities.
Where did the submitter get this idea? Also, why didn't the submitter link to impressions of people who got hands on experience yesterday? Everybody agreed that the Lumia 920 wiped the floor with all competing products.
In auto commercials, cars are 3d renders.
...the list goes on.
Apple's siri commercials are simulated experiences.
Cereal boxes and chocolate bars are made larger in those ads.
Screen images are simulated.
Can you hear me now is not actually talking on his cell phone.
OR instead you could point out how well Mr. Elop has done turning the ancient dinosaur Nokia into the nimble, most successful Windows phone company, making him a very deserving (of a humongous bonus that is) CEO. He can even take a nice picture of that fat check - shaking with excitement but nonetheless rock solid stabilized - and upload it to Bing (via Facebook). Oooh, the joy!
Why on earth did anyone expect any of this commercial was shot with an actual Lumina?
Does anyone realize how impractical this is, or even how bad it would look on your HDTV?
Nokia's only mistake here is not putting "Not actual footage. This is a simulation of actual results" disclaimer on the split screen parts.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Oh how I long for the day a Nokia 7110 would arrive at my desk so I could talk to Morpheus
Silence is a state of mime.
Apologies after you've already been caught shouldn't really count . ''I told the judge how sorry I was for robbing that bank, but he still gave me twenty years!". Here's a thought, how about not lying in the first place? Does the phone's camera really suck that badly that you had to fake your ad? Whose decision to use the dslr was this really??
In theory, yes... But if you turn on the shopping channel and look at the before-vs-after images of any exercising device ad, I'm sure the results weren't achieved using just (or even "mainly") the advertised device. Similarly, if you look at any makeup ad in a magazine, you can bet on the fact that the images have been "enhanced" digitally AND that the models were wearing false lashes, etc. which is also misleading. If you look at the product image of anything that you can eat (be it a McDonalds ad or printed to the packaging in the local grocery) you can be quite confident that the image is very misleading, compared to what the product will actually look like when you buy it.
In all of the above, the lie isn't "gives you wings" type of over the top one, but actually something you're supposed to believe... and yet those are the norm.
I do think that this was a cheap trick from Nokia and I'd like to think that they wouldn't have done that in the pre-Elop era... But as far as advertising goes, this isn't exactly scandalous.
Since no one else seemed to have posted a link to the video, here it is.
And often food in commercials is faked and not suitable for eating (because of paint, being raw inside etc). Often chocolate is just brown paint, strawberries are painted to have more vidi colors, icecream can be made of "mashed potato covered in motor oil" etc. Commercials have long history of being full of lies and often even reviews of products are fake.
...provided they actually tell us. For instance, the promo shots of Nikon cameras are shot using medium format cameras, something Nikon doesn't even make. The best tool for the job, I say. They key is not lying about it. While they could have been clearer, they didn't explicitly say that it was shot with the phone.
Move sig!
Are you telling me I cannot trust anyone in a white van? Maybe that guy really didn't have candy in there.... I gotta go....
So Nokia fake an advert about their image stabilization, which apparently isn't good enough to use for the advert and somehow that's *MY* and everyone elses fault for being naive?
No, the advert showed two people filming each other with the phone, it showed side-by-side shots of the phone with image stabilization and without. They are required to either say the shots are fake, or do them for real. To fail to do so is deception and they have to compensate people who were misled.
You can say everyone is naive, but that's not true, you advertise a product, it has to be the product, the rules are simple. You are naive if you think advertisers get away with it all the time and Nokias were only unlucky.
What's wrong with actual footage? Seriously, is that so hard to do? Truck companies figured that one out a while back, show a picture of a truck doing something really notable and than in the fine print in the bottom you put "actual demonstration". Makes it all the more impressive.
We're very deeply sorry that we got caught. We did not intend anyone to know about this deception. In the future, we promise to do a better job at hiding our dishonest activities so that we do not get caught again.
Is it normal that I just watched it a second time, just for the girl?
Yes they will be more careful next time....
No, the burger IS the burger, it's required to be. The bun is the bun, the lettuce is the lettuce. All they do is get a big batch and choose the best, light it the best, present it the best way they can. But it IS the product.
It follows to fix misleading advertising, all we have to do is block one or two Nokia ads and we're there.
"They could have been demonstrating the effect not the device."
Then they needed to put "simulated image" just as Apple had to put "sequence shortened" when they cut out delays from their ads.
Nokia know they did wrong, they apologized, pretending everybody does it when that's patently not true is just misleading.
Using non-genuine techniques and materials in advertisements to make products more appealing!? What is the world coming to! Why can't Nokia be more like fast food industry, where all vegetables rolling across the screen are as fresh and dew-covered as the ones we get in our burgers; or more like the deodorant industry, which clearly demonstrates the female-attracting effects of a man on a horse; or beer commercials where anything is possible! For shame Nokia, for shame!
Bow before me, for I am root.
Either they are really confident that actual PureView performance will match the pro-grade video, or this is beyond stupid.
This is Elop, so it's hard to say. It's certainly an effective way to further erode any trust in the Nokia brand. Now, whether that's intentional or not...
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The 920 will be out soon and everyone will be able to test everything it does and claims to do, from Pureview to wireless charging. The bloggers and journalists will be all over it before anybody buys one.
Really. Did anyone think this was anything but an advert with a pretty girl?
What this is though, is clumsy. The word has characterised Nokia since Elop came on board. Which is not how I would have characterised the company before.
"We're sorry that we got caught."
This is exactly what we expect and have seen Microsoft do, even in court, so with MS Elop at the helm, his Microsoft Windows love affair and now this. This is soooo par for the course.
Why did Nokia end up in this mess?
They had Symbian which made them a lot of money but was getting stale with UX. So Nokia started making a new Linux-based OS, which was called Maemo. Then, for some unknown reason they partnered with Intel and Maemo became Meego.
Meego was getting delayed.
Meanwhile Nokia did publish a Maemo phone, the N900. This was quite an OK phone, and got good reviews. Nokia was back on track.
Enter Stephen Elop as the new CEO. First thing the Microsoft alumni does is destroy the revenue stream from Symbian phones with his burning platform speech. Next thing he does is destroy any hope of any future by killing Meego.
Third thing he does is announce a partnership with Microsoft which means the in-house software development essentially has to cease. At this point Nokia has been beaten to a comatose state. Talent is bleeding out of the company.
Questions: Why did Nokia self-destruct its future? Who did Paul Allen meet in Helsinki on his boat, was this where the deal to trash Nokia was made? What is Shell chairman Jorma Ollila's (ex-Nokia CEO, Nokia chairman of the board) role in all this?
We know the result of all this: Nokia is nearly dead, ready to be given the final rites by Microsoft, which will devour Nokia's patents. Nearly all mobile operating systems are on the hands of a few North American companies. Strategically this makes a lot of sense to the USA, as it is showing a tendency to snoop on everyone's private data regardless of who and where they are. What better way to do this than to control the OS in a device which is with each person almost all the time.
This makes me think the decision to destroy Nokia was in some way dictated by US interests. Why the Finnish government accepted all this is beyond me - they must have gotten something valuable in return.
So what did the Finns get?
One thing I guess they got was a promise to become a big player in the content industry (games) area. Just look at the hype around Rovio and their Angry Birds. I doubt the rise of content industry in a narrow sector would be enough to offset the loss of an entire strategically important R&D cluster. Therefore I think this was not enough.
But what more could it be? Promise to become a member of NATO without "officially" becoming a member of NATO?
Maybe instead of a carrot, a stick was used. But what was the stick?
I am appalled that the Finnish government with the industry movers and shakers have basically eaten popcorn and watched the show without doing anything. Not so many years ago a lot of tax money was constantly funneled into Nokia's research projects. It was the pride of the whole nation, and this was mirrored in the behaviour of the government and the industry. Now the same clowns are watching a whole high-tech cluster vaporize in thin air without doing ANYTHING.
And lo and behold, Samsung will be next.
You'll get something not far off a DSLR.
All optical or mechanical image stabilization solutions I've worked with (Canon, Sony, Pentax) are just plain _AWESOME_. There's no reason to assume Nokia's solution isn't. Apart from this stupid commericial, that is.
0x or or snor perron?!
I don't know what was in the ad, but I now imagine a guy in a suit addressing the camera like this:
Please buy this phone as it is not crap.
We are still a relevant company.
We have not let a troll into our CEO seat.
And our decision to adopt the Windows platform was above reproach.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
that's what happens when Nokia -an already flailing company teams up with M$. I expect BTSOD (Blue touch screen of death) any time soon..