Hewlett Packard is running a commercial for their color printers and scanners. In the commercial, a child is at school, giving a report about planets. His speech is of the form, “I scanned this planet in from a magazine,” … “I printed this out on an HP XXXX color printer,” etc. He never says anything about the planets. All he did is scan some pages from a magazine and print them out. Throughout his speech he gets applause.

Is this what school reports are supposed to be? There’s no content! Maybe HP is trying to appeal to people who don’t think. Argh!

3 comments:

Anonymous wrote at Friday, August 18, 2006 at 6:31:00 PM PDT

You are right. They complain about teachers and bad schools but the truth is children nowadays are brainwashed by TV.

Anonymous wrote at Thursday, August 31, 2006 at 8:34:00 AM PDT

You are right Amit,...I Do agreee to your statement.. but The other commercial of HP is nice. What do you say....

Simon Quellen Field wrote at Thursday, September 28, 2006 at 2:29:00 PM PDT

Of course, the people who write the commercials aren't necessarily the best products of our educational system. They may have gotten by without knowing anything about planets, or how to write a report, but lots about how to manipulate opinions.

Americans like humor that lets them feel superior to the person in the joke. I would not be surprised if they felt the same way about their television commercials. The writers don't want the kid to teach their prospective customers anything but that they should buy that printer, because it can make a content-free report into a winner, and even an idiot can look good if the printer is from HP.

That the commercial is also sending other messages that none of us like is probably well under their radar.