You know, I really like this Nokia ad mocking iPhone users over their lack of color choices.
Featuring a joyless, shifting line moving slowly forward to consume the monochrome iPhone 5, it shows a gray world thrown into anarchy when one customer dares to ask about their color choices. Then, when that customer steps out of line, he sees a number of bright, vibrant, colorful people wandering around, uniquely bopping and having fun. They are all carrying Lumias.
It’s fairly easy as a longtime Apple fan to dismiss the recently aired “Genius” ads as nothing more than a misstep in a rather stellar marketing history by the, well, geniuses in Cupertino. However, a new study by Brandindex Buzz shows a shift in the demographic trends for the Apple brand, which may go to explain the goofy ads as more specifically targeted advertising.
Apple has aired a new commercial for the iPhone 4S. Simply called “iCloud Harmony,” the 30-second TV spot highlights iCloud’s ability to sync your media and apps between devices. “Automatic. Everywhere. iCloud.“
Apple’s reputation for having the best advertisements out of all technology companies on the planet is well deserved. Not only are their ads phenomenal in quality, but they’ve made a certified crap load of them. The iPhone alone has enjoyed 84 separate TV advertisements over its five year exsistence, and now you can watch them all in one place. Adweek has compiled the entire iPhone advertising campaign into a single page so Apple fans can go through each ad chronologically, starting with the famous “Hello” ad that premiered at the Oscars in 2007, to the most recent one where a kid commands Siri to proclaim him a Rock God.
With so many ads, it’s hard to declare a favorite, but here’s a couple that we’re pretty fond of:
Samsung has shamelesslyripped-offApple‘s products every step of the way, but this has got to be a new — well, not low, but something. Not content to just rip-off Apple’s product designs, Samsung is now stealing the very actresses from Apple’s own commercials!
Late last week, Apple uploaded this fantastic new ad to their official YouTube account, and it really is a beautiful piece of work: a magical mystery tour through a collection of living, breathing Beatles covers.
It’s really charming how proud Apple is of getting the Beatles on iTunes, to the extent that over a year later, Apple is still advertising the Beatles as if they are one of their own in-house products, like an iPhone or iPad.
Apple doesn’t really like it when its employees speak to the press. Like, at all. So it’s interesting to see a British voice actor who provided the male voice For Siri — arguably the voice of Apple these days — openly speaking to journalists about how he came to speak for every iPhone 4S on Earth, especially considering Cupertino tried to muzzle him.
Sharp has just matched the iPhone 4’s touchscreen pixel for pixel with their new IS03 Phone, but that’s not going to stop Apple from crowing about the Retina Display in their latest ad, highlighting the fact that the world’s “highest-resolution phone screen ever” will make “every freckle, every wrinkle” (and presumably every wart, every melanoma, and every port wine stain) look clearer and more beautiful than ever before.
For extra points, check out those impossibly beautiful Twitter friends the iPhone 4 hand model has. Compared to that, my Twitter friends are a sad collection of hobos.
If Apple’s livestream broke down for you last night during the world premiere of Apple’s new iPod nano and iPod Touch commercials, Apple has just shot both of them up online via their official YouTube channels.
The new iPod nano ad is backed by the track “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” by Cake from the album Comfort Eagle, and largely focuses on the new nano’s built-in touchscreen and the ability to flick the display around to any orientation depending upon where it’s clipped, as the nano itself is traded between the usual headless iPod models, morphing between the nano’s new colors as it is handed off.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t_IobxOsVc
On the other hand, the new iPod Touch ad is heavily focused on gaming and the touch’s new camera abilities, backed by the song “Come Home” off of Chappo’s Plastique Universe.
The end of the spot is a bit surreal, though, as a pair of white male hands each uses its gripped iPod Touch to take part in a FaceTime call with its partner. The faces on the display, though, usually don’t match the hands… giving me, at least, the impression that FaceTime on the iPod Touch was being demonstrated by some sort of pieced-together Frankenstein of spare body parts, or being silently observed by two spectating device hackers who had somehow managed to hack into the FaceTime protocol.
Microsoft has a rather ignoble history when it comes to trying to counter Apple’s hyper-effective and popular “Get a Mac” campaign. Their first efforts were just embarrassing: a series of advertisements featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates awkwardly mumbling non sequiturs at one another. That desperate bid for hipness failed, and so Microsoft launched their Laptop Hunter ads, which were comparatively straightforward: a camera crew followed “real” computer shoppers as they looked for new machines, and documented their ultimate choice of Windows laptops. Simple, pleasant and marginally effective… even if they did repeat all of the old, stupid fallacies about Apple computers costing significantly more than similarly specced Windows machines.
Pretty soon, though, controversy hit. Lauren deLong, an adorable red ead featured in the “Laptop Hunter” ads, turned out to be an actress with a filmography of ten movies to her credit. Since Microsoft’s ads purported to be following “real computer shoppers,” that made the ads’ truthfulness somewhat dubious.
So here’s the question: were the Laptop Hunters ads what the proclaimed themselves to be, or completely fictional? The “behind-the-scenes” footage of the Laptop Hunter ads shoot, as embedded above and first posted back in September, baldly asserts that participants were not told they were in a commercial until after they had picked their machines.
I’m not buying it. Not only are the individuals in the ads just a little too pointed in their dismissal of Apple products — I think a more common response to why a PC users would reject a Mac would be “I’ve always used Windows machines!” and not “It really seems like you’re paying for the aesthetics” — but surely, a professional actress like Ms. deLong would be savvy enough recognize the financial opportunity that had just presented itself if a film crew that had followed her around all day told her she’d be in a national campaign for Microsoft. The next thing she would have said is, “I have to call my agent,” not “How’s my hair?”
