We consider holographic cosmological models of dark energy in which the infrared cutoff is set by the Hubbles radius. We show that any interacting dark energy model, regardless of its detailed form, can be recast as a non interacting model in which t
he holographic parameter $c^{2}$ evolves slowly with time. Two specific cases are analyzed. We constrain the parameters of both models with observational data, and show that they can be told apart at the perturbative level.
