For example, all of the commercials for Motorola’s smart phone the Droid contain a disclaimer that the word is actually a trademark of Lucasfilm. Granted George Lucas gave us R2D2 and C3P0 but who knew you could own a word. If these disclaimers came along after Droid’s marketing began you can bet Motorola didn’t.

Now a disclaimer has appeared on a series of AT&T commercials. The spots show huge pieces of orange fabric being unrolled over buildings and well-known landmarks to illustrate how completely AT&T’s mobile network blankets the country.

The spots are visually engaging and illustrate the point in a unique way. But now at the very end in small type it says, “The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have no direct or indirect association with AT&T.”

Huh?!

Some quick research reveals that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are husband and wife artists who have created giant art installations around the world by wrapping entire buildings and geographic areas in different types of cloth. Sound familiar?!

Amongst other things the couple has wrapped the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; an oceanfront beach in Newport, Rhode Island; and a large part of New York’s Central Park.  You can see pictures at their Web site.

The artists donated the merchandising rights from the New York project to the charitable foundation Nurture New York’s Nature and the Arts which shared proceeds with The Central Park Conservancy. Now AT&T has stolen the idea for an ad campaign.  Silly me! I always thought they called it ad creative for a reason. I’ve never heard it called ad copying.

I realize that modifying someone else’s concept isn’t a new idea, but taking the work of two artists for a cellular network commercial just seems wrong. At the very least the campaign should pay homage to them or make a donation to a charitable organization they have supported.

Instead they get a disclaimer.

Related posts:

1. AT&T finally grows a pair, goes after Verizon
2. Even Grimace thought this was a dumb St. Pat’s promo from McDonalds
3. WalletPop’s Ad Rant gives us the 10 worst (meh) ads of the decade

Let me just state that the headline for this post is just me fucking with the folks over at Mashable for writing an article entitled, “New Droid Incredible Commercial Is Incredible But Vague” apparently just after cleaning up from a major orgasm after seeing the damn thing.  I actually love reading Mashable and do so everyday, but damn the geeks that run that joint flip out when some new tech hits the streets.  Verizon could have issued a commercial that just had some radom dude next to a flip chart of stats shaking the new phone like a baby rattle while cooing, “Look! New Droid phone!” and the writers would have lost their shit and called it “the best commercial EVAH!”

Now on to the ad… First, if you’ve read any of my other postings, you know I hate it when they just sell the steak and not the sizzle, that is, they just throw around a bunch of stats like they friggin’ mean something on their own.  This ad has some real doozies in that department, my favorite being a “1 GH Snapdragon processor.”  It reminds me of that bit from an old episode of Seinfeld where Jerry’s dad gives away the Cadillac he bought him and Jerry goes, “But it had the Northstar System!” and the dad goes, “I never used it!”

Guys, no one but people in the industry gives a shit what is inside of this damn thing.  They just want to be able to use it as a phone and have their favorite Lady Ga Ga song as a ring tone.  The rest of the crap you pile on as impressive selling just gets parroted back by your customers when their friends start making fun of them for not buying an iPhone.

Second, the look of the ad is basically a red version of the “data rain” effect used in opening titles of every Matrix movies.  That’s right, the Matrix movies that starting coming out in 1999.  You know, nothing says “cutting edge technology” to me than an 11 year old effect from a movie series that even geeks say got progressively worse with each release.

I don’t know what agency created this turd, but I’m guessing they were fed the concept from someone high up at Verizon.

VERIZON: So, here’s our new phone, it’s called… (waves hands in the air) “The Incredible”

AD GUY: It’s actually called, “The Incredible”?

VERIZON: I know, awesome right?

AD GUY: Are you not planning on coming out with any other phones ever again?  I mean, what will you call the next one, “The Incredible Plus?”

VERZION: Whatever, I won’t be here by then… Anyway, what are your ideas for the ad?

AD GUY: Well, we were thinking…

VERIZON: Yeah, fuck that… what I want to see are all the stats for the phone flying around in a sea of numbers and shit, just like the beginning of The Matrix.

AD GUY: You mean kind of like that right?

VERIZON: No, exactly like that… they probably sell the effect as a Photoshop plugin now.  It’ll be awesome!

Damn I don’t know how agency people put up with clients half the time.  I was only agency side for a year before I went back to being a client for fear of mortally wounding a paying customer and putting their head up on a spike in front of the office.

J.

Related posts:

1. What Droid does seems a little petty to me, guys
2. DTM’s 2010 wish for the advertising biz: cool it with the effing hyperbole
3. AT&T & Verizon: I Thought It Was Called Creative [RANT]

Here was the ad that introduced most humans to this new technical wonder:

So, I get it, the ad is making fun of the Mac’s style of ads with their little black text on a white background and the cutesy music that you claim you hate, but you end up buying anyway because the damn thing gets stuck in your head.  Plus, you have the bonus of an iPhone/iPod/iEverything joke from the late nineties in the form of every sentence start with “iDon’t”.

Yup, that’s some pretty clever stuff there, gang. I can tell you put a lot of thought in that over there. Way to stick it to the establishment, brother.

Here’s the problem though, all the stuff you call out as a problem, isn’t really much of a problem to the common folks.  That is, what you just presented to a lot of people was a really weak argument for switching from the iPhone to the Droid.

Let’s take a look at them, shall we?

- I don’t have a real keyboard

Yeah, that was kind of the point though, right?  I mean, the iPhone was designed not to have a keyboard so you wouldn’t run into all the problems caused by having a bunch of little moving parts on something that lives in your pocket most of the time.  I know some people are into the whole tactile, button pushing thing, but so was I before I got my iPhone and I adapted pretty quick.

- I don’t run simultaneous apps

This one is just kinda geeky and maybe even a little incorrect.  I mean, I know what you’re trying to say, the iPhone really only runs one thing at a time for the most part, but how often is that really an issue?  It is a damn phone after all and most of the time I’m happy that I can keep my music playing in the background while I’m looking at a map.  If you really need something that runs a bunch of simultaneous applications, then maybe kick back over to a laptop, that’s what they’re for in the first place.

- I don’t take 5 megapixel pictures

Yeah, that’s because the iPhone really isn’t a camera.  I know, I know, they all have little cameras in them these days, but still, it’s a friggin’ phone… the camera is just kind of a nice to have.  If I want really good pictures, I use an actual camera.

- I don’t customize

This sounded like a big deal until I remembered I wasn’t a 12 year old girl and could give a shit about customizing my phone.  You want to make your phone look pretty? Get a nice case, d-bag.

- I don’t run widgets

Yeah, and I hardly miss them either.  I remember when they started the whole widget thing on Windows and it was the first thing I turned off.  Annoying little wastes of space.

- I don’t allow open development

Again, a little geeky fellas.  First of all, who gives a shit? The iPhone has like a bajillion apps these days and while Apple is a little deutschland deutschland with its approval cycle, it stills let a crapload of great apps onto the market on a regular basis.

- I don’t take pictures in the dark

Again, that’s because it’s not really a camera.  You want pictures in the dark, go get a camera. Most of the time people are just making that goofy fish lip face at an arm’s length anyway, so the need for high-resolution, properly lit camera work is a little over played.

- I don’t have interchangeable batteries

You know, when I was considering my iPhone, this was actually one of the things that bothered me about their setup, the fact that you can’t replace the batteries.  Then I remembered, over the years, with the many, many phones I’ve owned, I can only remember once when I actually needed a spare battery and by the time I actually needed to replace a battery that wasn’t charging like it used to, it was time to ditch the phone anyway.

* * *

My point in all of this is, who the hell is this ad for?  The easy answer is “early adopters”, that geeky subset of users that just buy anything new and shiny before they work all the bugs out just because it is, new and shiny.  But then I thought about it a little more; if this is aimed at early adopters, what’s with the media buy?

I used this particular version of the Droid ad because it bleeds into a baseball game.  The first time I actually saw this ad, I was watching a Sunday night football game.  So, maybe you’ll catch some of the early adopters during sports, but probably not a lot of that version of the early adopter even know what “open source development” is in the first place. That set is over watching that hot chick on G4 talk about video games.

Also, they bought a TON of media time for this campaign. Not just for this spot, but for all of the spots in the campaign, plus a boat load of radio, outdoor, and a bunch of shit I probably haven’t even seen.  I haven’t bought traditional media in awhile, but last time I looked, the early adopter set was a pretty small market and you’re casting a net like you’re selling a new burger at McDonald’s.

I don’t have the media plan in front of me, but I get the feeling that what we’re looking at is two very big companies with two very big budgets that really needed to swing their corporate junk around to get people’s attention off the iPhone for awhile.

Well, good friggin’ luck with that, guys.  The one thing you forget to do to make the Droid a direct competitor to the iPhone is make it cute.  Ugh, yeah, I know… I hated even writing that. But that’s what it’s going to come down to in the end. You can make your little wonder of a phone do all the same shit the iPhone does and more, but until you can convince a regular, good old fashioned, thong-wearin’ chick to buy one of them, you’re only going to sell the things to the geek set.  While there may be a lot of geeks running the show these days (trust me, I’m a member of the Blade Runner fan club, here), there are a bunch more chicks that love their phones.

Just sayin’, maybe next time spend a little less time measuring up to the other boys and more time learning how to impress your date.

J.

Related posts:

1. New Droid Incredible Commercial is [not] Incredible [at all] AND Vague [VIDEO]
2. Gillette all about smelling like a man, and making guys uncomfortable in the steam room
3. AT&T & Verizon: I Thought It Was Called Creative [RANT]