WSJ
- WSJ
MarketWatch
- MarketWatch
Barron's
- Barron's
SmartMoney
- SmartMoney
AllThingsDigital
FINS
- FINS
Factiva
- Factiva
More
- BigCharts
- Virtual Stock Exchange
- Financial News
- WSJ Asia
- WSJ Europe
  - WSJ Deutschland
- WSJ Americas
  - en Español
  - em Português
- WSJ Classifieds
- WSJ Radio
- WSJ Wine

QOTD

August 4, 2009 at 6:18 am PT

“We weren’t trying to creep people out, but one thing I have learned now in this digital age is people can be as rude as they want as long as they don’t have to look you in the face. The Pre is probably being talked about more than other phones right now because of the marketing and advertising, and that’s a good thing. Could the ads work harder to show exactly how the phone works? Yes, but we knew it would be polarizing people to have a woman not shout at them and tell an interesting story.”

– Gary Koepke, co-founder and executive creative director at Modernista, the agency responsible for the Palm Pre’s ad campaign

Tagged with: Gary Koepke, John Paczkowski, Modernista, Palm, Pre, QOTD, quoted, shorty

comments so far. Add yours.

http://allthingsd.com/ Eric Welch

What Pre ads?

Everyone’s talking about them? If they are, then they’re not talking about them here in Southern California. Because I have yet to hear one person mention Pre ads. (Working in a school with students from all over the world, you’d think we’d hear something.)

Another hyperbolic claim by someone connected to the Pre. That’s about as unusual as Steve Ballmer bloviating nonsense about Apple.
http://allthingsd.com/ Paul Collins

They’re decent ads. They don’t look like a copy of an Apple ad (how many ads do you see full shots of people on a white background?). They’re unusual and get your attention, they more or less have a point (ease of use/capability/elegance). And the long screen time of the woman’s face probably gets some people hitting the skip button to go back and see what the ad’s about.

I’m not creeped out. Does that make me creepy?
Fred Hamranhansenhansen

I’m not creeped out by these commercials. The problem I have with them is you can superimpose any phone over the Pre and the commercial still works. You can change this into a commercial for the Treo from 3 years ago or PalmPilot from 10 years ago and it all works. You can superimpose bathroom tissue or pretty much any personal hygiene product and it still works.

With the iPhone commercials, Apple raised the bar in the phone industry by demonstrating the use and functionality of the device instead of flying it around the screen or featuring it at the end of an unrelated short movie, as is done here by Palm. I would be impressed with a Pre ad campaign where they redo iPhone commercials on the Pre, showing me why the Pre is better. Or show me something the iPhone can’t do, which the Pre can (there must be something). I know you can’t talk on the phone and use the Internet at the same time on a Pre, which seems outrageously limiting to me, but apparently this is true of all nonstandard phones. I know the Pre has no 3rd party apps and only 80 or so 3rd party widgets, but there have to be a few that are worth showing off.

Basically, these commercials are a punt. If they had something to show within the device itself, they would show it. But it’s hard to go “65,000 apps on iPhone? well, we’ve got 80 widgets!” or “32GB storage on iPhone? We can offer you a whole 8GB for the same price!” or “we’ve got the same camera as iPhone only without the camcorder and the touch-to-focus!”

All of this would be fine except Palm shot their mouths off in a historic way before the Pre shipped. They talked maybe more trash than has ever been demonstrated in the technology industry. But on launch day, they were out there trying to walk the trash talk back. And now they are doing conceptual lifestyle commercials instead of showing people what the device is for and how it functions.