Honesty in Advertising

Posted on August 9, 2008
Filed Under General Tech, Web Programming

truth When meeting with a client today, we were looking at various website in his market/field and we were intrigued by a site of a local competitor who, in my initial opinion, had a great site. Great presentation - easy navigation and overall, just a well put together website that was visually appealing. Top notch.

I was impressed UNTIL I looked at their testimonials page and encountered something a bit fishy. My client had the inclination right away when he made the comment, “I’ve seen those pictures before” and I realized he meant that he’d seen them in stock photography galleries. One picture did strike me as familiar…and so, true to my inquisitive nature, the hunt was on.

I did a search for the companies that the testimonies were referring to and an interesting thing happened…

None of the companies existed. Want to know what the top hits were when I searched for the company names? You may have guessed it. Oh yea, it was the service provider site which posted the testimonials.

Bad, bad form. Why lie? Why fabricate stories? This is a larger Portland firm so I’m a little baffled that they wouldn’t have three LEGIT testimonies they could post. Was it laziness or could they (aghast!) not actually find three testimonies that they could make public?

If you are a web developer working with a client who provides you with misleading statements or outright fabrications (a fancy word for “lies”), don’t you have a moral obligation to object to the posting of such material? Even if it may be common - it’s not honest and therefore immoral. Instead of outright objecting to the inclusion - I think we can make the honest choice to “suggest” that the client get some real statements and pictures of real customers. I’m guessing that the web designer was asked to get three photos to go with the testimonials.

Cheap tricks make you just that - cheap…no matter how shiny the outer shell may be.