So Motorola’s just started advertising the Droid in the UK. Except rather than ‘Droid’, as Motorola calls the phone in the US, our version is called ‘Milestone’. And instead of adverts showing stealth fighter planes bombing us with advanced technology, we get some voice-over lady telling us about ‘versatility’. Am I the only one who thinks we got the short straw?
(apologies if youtube pulls either of these.)
check out the US advert here.
check out the UK advert here.
Full disclosure as I start: I am an H G Wells fan, and any film that references The War of the Worlds would probably get my vote automatically. I’m not adverse to stealth jets either. Honestly, the eight year-old in me thinks they’re actually rather awesome. So when I say that I think the US advert has its charms, I do have some less-than-formal reasons for doing so. However, our bland UK alternative leaves me feeling as if there’s more reasons for me to prefer the US’s version than simply its engagement with Michael Bay-esque boyish fantasy. These two adverts show a modern, useful consumer item being pitched in drastically different ways, and when that happens, it’s because somebody out there thinks that two groups of people buy for very different reasons.
I’m not going to get into the value of the US commercial. As much as I generally love US marketing strategies, quite a few of them would take a bit of time to logically justify (that recent Michael Bay ‘Victoria’s Secret’ ad springs to mind…). More interesting to me is the UK advert, and it’s attempt to basically pummel the viewer with a list of ‘features’. Roughly speaking, that list is:
- the phone’s ‘advanced’, allowing a ‘richer, deeper experience’
- connectivity: ‘connect in an instant’
- adapatable – it ‘gets smarter’
- it ‘knows where you are’
- it ‘understands what you want’
- runs android 2.0 (well, 2.1 pretty soon, but they don’t mention that)
- it has both real keyboard + virtual one on its touchscreen
- camera: ‘experience life clearer, wider, richer, the way it was meant to be seen’
- and in conclusion: it is ‘without compromise’
Now call me crazy, but i don’t really see any USP’s in that list, other than perhaps Android 2.0, and that point of difference is going to mean nothing by the time the phone goes mainstream in the UK. It’s not really the product’s fault; after all, the boys at Engadget called DROID ‘the best Android phone to date’ [read the full review here], and with a little work, it wouldn’t be too hard to pull this advert into meaningful differentiation info (i’d focus on Android and Google integration myself, maybe the screen res, maybe the 5mp camera over iPhone 3gS’s 3.1mp). But that’s not what the list achieves; rather than being informative, it’s over-long, verbose, full of ultimately meaningless assurances. The effect it has is pretty much the opposite of what it should have done: it makes you wonder if the ‘Milestone’ does, in fact, have anything going for it.
To make this point clearer, consider the ad in the context of some other recent phone marketing. Apple’s recent iPhone brand work in the UK has put a lot of focus on the App Store, such as this example from World of Apple. Now that, at least, is successfully identifying a point of difference, since no other service comes close to the volume of apps Apple’s got up on their store. HTC, in their own way, follow the same USP tactic; the whole ‘quietly brilliant’ campaign seems to reflect HTC’s focus on Android pretty well, identifying the OS’s somewhat-of-a-newcomer status and picking up on the general public tech sense that anything by Google must be pretty decent. Even when they move onto the whole interactivity aspect – ‘you don’t need to get a phone, you need a phone that gets you’ – they keep it satisfyingly focused, such as this example for the Hero [image from slashgear].What could Motorola have picked up from all these enemy broadcasts? If i wanted to point out the path to Motorola, i’d probably remind them that ‘Droid’ being the first proper Android 2.0 device was probably part of why they decided to brand it as ‘Milestone’ over here in Europe in the first place. So what happened to that? If they’d stuck to their guns and kept it simple, they’d have a pretty clear USP, at least for initial exposure.
Pulling back to what I was thinking about when I started writing this post, I have to wonder why Motorola decided to so drastically alter the presentation. I guess it’s probably different US and EMEA offices commissioning different campaigns, but i still feel that the stealth fighter jets would have been a better option. (Honestly: when are they not?) As gloriously ambiguous as the US ad is, at least it sticks to roughly one main point: Droid is the most advanced, future-proof phone on the market. If we try and presume that the last line of the Euro ad is the heavy hitter, then we have to try and work with its primary point being that it is a phone ‘without compromise’. That’s a hard pill to swallow. Without getting into it too much, how is a phone that offers both touch screen and actual keyboards not in some way a compromise? And when you consider that Android 2.1 is probably getting pushed out to the phone sometime in Q1 2010, it seems that the release OS was equally the result of pragmatism. Especially when we remember that – at the moment – there’s no Google Maps Navigation in Europe.
So what do i propose? As it is, we get a boring ad as well as an undersold product. No one wins there. So why not have more HG Wells, and more stealth fighter jets? At least then we’d get an enjoyable viewing experience. And whilst you’re there, bring back that Orange ad where Steven Seagal pitches a romcom to Orange by destroying a golf cart.
R
[edit: comment aside, the minimal initial indications are that Milestone is pre-ordering like hot cakes. We'll have to wait and see what happens with general release. Maybe Motorola's European taste sensors got the boring ad right?]
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