The ad war that began with the Droid’s hyped release this fall has pitted it and Verizon against AT&T and the iPhone, and the big guns have been blazing. Yet while AT&T and the Droid play for different teams, they do share a similar trait: a muddled marketing scheme. It didn't start that way.
The Droid piqued interests with it's "iDon't" commercial during the World Series, disparaging the iPhone and promising a better smart phone from Verizon. Brief and enigmatic, the ad intrigued a market otherwise in the thrall of the iPhone.
If phase one was a leaflet-dropping campaign, phase two of the attack was Verizon's full-on bombardment against the iPhone’s exclusive carrier, AT&T. The “there’s a map for that" ads have been biting and clever. (AT&T also thought they were misleading and sued Verizon. They’ve since agreed to disagree.) One ad suggests the iPhone, a technological marvel rendered useless by its carrier, should be shipped off to the Island of Misfit Toys. Given the persistent hopes for a Verizon iPhone some day, that one might have rankled AT&T execs.
To counter Verizon’s map ads, AT&T hired Luke Wilson, pumped him full of smarm and snark (which doesn't seem to come naturally to nice-guy Wilson), and tossed him to the front line. In an ad targeting Verizon’s supposedly slow download speed, the actor totters around the set, headless. In a response to Verizon’s “map for that” ads, Wilson tosses postcards onto a large map to indicate all the cities AT&T covers. The weak ad not only reveals that Verizon has gotten under AT&T’s skin (and in a more public way than a lawsuit), but the best it could muster was a “We do so have good coverage!” schoolyard riposte.
If advertising is mainly concerned with perception, Verizon is the dominant force in the Carrier Battle. Its Droid, however, appears to be having identity issues. While the new phone’s ads have mostly featured an otherwordly, robotic theme (it is a Droid, after all), one of its new spots is a bizarre, disturbing mishmash of vignettes unrelated to applications, features, or carriers. Condemning the iPhone as a "tiara wearing, digitally clueless beauty pageant queen" is so in-your-face over the top as to be unseemly. (A better knock might have been against Apple as the gadget of choice among the condescending elite.) We’re finishing our testing now of the Droid, but our first impressions—and the public’s—have generally been positive. How Verizon imagined that smashing tomatoes against mannequins or crushing cute porcelain lambs would make their Droid more appealing is mind-boggling.
And how has Apple’s iPhone responded to the beauty-queen attacks? The same way it always does—by deftly demonstrating its useful apps against a trademark white backdrop, disregarding any competition, and coming off rather West Coast about the whole capitalism thing.
Judging by the ads, these two alliances of carrier and phone appear somewhat dysfunctional. On each side, a strong, assertive member is dragged down by a seemingly weak partner. Would Apple be more in sync with Verizon? Do the Droid and AT&T deserve each other? A few barbed commercials may not play much of a part when it comes to multi-million-dollar corporate contracts, but the ads do encourage the question.
—Nick K. Mandle
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