| Sunday, March 1, 2009 |
15:09 - Now let's not be a poor sport
http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/26/the-blackberry-storm-ad-that-might-have-been/#con
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JMH sends this unreleased-therefore-viral ad for the BlackBerry Storm. You know, the thing that was supposed to blow away the iPhone and all its underwhelmed users.
About as mature—and as convincing—as that BuyMusic.com ad from right after the iTunes Music Store opened, the one with Tommy Lee snatching up the then-iconic iTunes guitar and smashing it to bits. Oh, sure, it's clever and all. It's a good ad. iPhone-haters surely find it cathartic. But like the Verizon phones that lamely try to claim things like "Touch does more!" before an audience that will only believe it if it's never seen an iPhone up close before, this one wouldn't have convinced anyone who wasn't already in the BlackBerry camp. iPhone users would just be irritated at the implication that they weren't as happy as they'd thought they were, and that what their cherished digital companion really needed wasn't apps, or a price drop, or better cell service, but to be smashed. That's not a sentiment that wins a lot of currency among the kind of people who buy Apple products.
Especially once it became clear just what a catastrophe the Storm turned out to be, which was made all the worse by the unreasonable expectations that its extant ad campaign had laid down for it.
Aside from all that, though, I wonder if maybe the reason they didn't go with this ad was simply that Infiniti used almost exactly the same gimmick for a recent string of ads...
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Brian Tiemann
