Advertising

Apple has released a new advertisement promoting the iPhone 3GS and its various range of Apps. This time, Apple is showing off a niche of the App Store by targeting sports enthusiasts.

The Apps mentioned in Apple’s latest marketing spot are Golfshot: Golf GPS (App Store link), MLB.com At Bat 2009 (App Store link) and TouchSports Tennis ‘09 (App Store link). The Apps range in price from $29.99, $9.99 and $0.99 respectively.

The ad is viewable after the jump:

Via: Macrumors

Apple’s iPhone Ads are known for their use of white backgrounds, preppy music, enthusiastic male narrator and a single, ominous hand holding the device demonstrating its various features and seemingly limitless array of Apps available for download. Bell Canada, one of the newest carriers for Palm’s smartphone, the Pre seems to have been more than just inspired by Apple’s video spots and has nearly copied the Ad bit for bit. While the ad was shot without counseling from Palm, it deviates from the handset maker’s use of a somewhat creepy and sterilizing female narrator describing the Pre’s features in an almost otherworldy experience.

Video after the break

Via: The iPhone Blog

The iPhone in China has been distributed through the black market since its US launch in 2007 much to Apple’s chagrin. Talks between carriers have fallen through numerous times over disagreements in licensing the device but now, it looks like the iPhone will be making its way to China the way Apple intended to.

Talks between major Chinese cellular carriers have failed numerous times with the details only be recently revealed over licensing issues such as revenue splitting in the App Store. Oddly, the iPhone has appeared on a website run by China Unicom’s Shanghai Branch as if in preparation for an imminent launch. A roughly translated version of the text from the Shanghai branch’s page:

The information, which listed smartphones supported by the 3G network China Unicom is building, appeared only on the Web site of the company’s Shanghai branch and did not say whether the products would be offered in China.

The site’s changes follow media reports that a China Unicom delegation visiting Apple last week made a breakthrough in talks over offering the iPhone 3G on its network.

While this is the most reliable evidence we’ve seen… more...

Couldn’t say how many iPhoners got this:

But more than one did. And in my informal poll so far it turns out that everyone surveyed hates it. Even if you love American Karaoke the idea that AT&T would waste your time with an ad for it extremely annoying. Okay AT&T this is exactly what not to do with your iPhone list. See, the idea that you’re going to feed iPhone users ads and generate a little revenue sounds like a great idea in the boardroom but it really angers the iPhone users. Everyone loves the iPhone but not many are enamored with AT&T (witness the success of the Storm, the only thing that thing has going for it is Verizon). Don’t give us more reasons to hate you.

In short: The iPhone is great for advertising but do it on Mobile Safari. Buy some ad space on sites and go crazy. Don’t force feed it to your customers via text. I know replying “stop” will supposedly make it go away (until the next time you decide an ad is really important) but it would be far preferable for everyone involved to have… more...

Take a look at the video and decide if you think it is deceptive advertising. Apple, as you would imagine, says it definitely is not. Apple maintains that the ad is more about comparing the speed of the iPhone 3G to the speed of the original iPhone than a representation of how the 3G will actually perform. Anyone who has used both versions of the iPhone can see the validity of this argument, there’s np way to do a direct comparison because there isn’t a site on the entire net the original iPhone could load in the time alloted to the ad.

On the other hand the ad does make the iPhone look impossibly fast. If someone went and bought the iPhone and expected that kind of performance they’d be seriously disappointed. Well, they’d be disappointed for a couple of hours because once you’ve used the iPhone for 120 minutes o so you’re hooked. So which is it, deceptive or explanative?

The bad news is that your opinion doesn’t really matter in this case (well it matters to IPM, we love our readers) because the… more...

Hadley Stern is miffed. He’s taking a look at what Apple has done in the past and with the iPhone and seen the copycats. What, exactly, is a Blackberry Storm if not a direct rip off of the iPhone? And you know RIM won’t give Apple a kiss after that screwjob so why not some cash?

Hadley’s not exactly that upfront about it but that is the take away message. All the companies coming out with touchscreen phones are really coming out with iPhone knockoffs and that doesn’t seem fair to the company who went through all the hard work of getting everything right in the first place. Read the entire article Should Other Companies Pay Apple at our sister site Apple Matters.

You’ve seen iPhone commercials and you’ve seen how quickly and smoothly the iPhone navigates the web in those commercials. If you have an iPhone you’ll likely agree that your iPhone doesn’t seem quite as snappy as the iPhone in the commercial. (On a personal note: sometimes my iPhone does seem as snappy as the one on the commercial, most of the time though…) Check out this awesome advertising versus reality bit:

Man, if we could do that to politicians… never mind. Anyway does this constitute deceptive advertising? Are customers being mislead by ads like these? Or is Apple compressing the normal amount of time it takes to do something on the iPhone just to get everything in the ad?
via: silicon alley insider

According to AdMob the iPhone is the world’s fastest growing device. Apparently they measure this by number of requests from the iPhone on the internet (measuring this is easy to do, but also easy to spoof). More interesting than the iPhone is some other stats found in the article. Smart phones accounted for 25.8% of worldwide traffic (hard to believe), and that the iPhone in conjunction with the other top five smart phones accounted for 12.9% of all US traffic (call me skeptical).

One supposes it is in AdMob’s interest to pump the numbers up to eleven for mobile browsing since the company is devoted to monetizing mobile advertising so the stats aren’t too surprising. And if they did reach the numbers with some wonky math just think of it as a glimpse into the future.
via:TMCnet.com

iPhone owners are a coveted market. Usually youngish and stocked with disposable cash they are the people every advertiser except the makers of Oops! I Crapped my Pants want to reach. If companies want to reach the iPhone enabled out there then the companies that sell ads want to give those advertisers a way to get their ads in front of iPhone users.

Predictably companies are optimizing ads for the iPhone. one of the first out of the gate? AOL. Platform-A will detect if you’re using an iphone and then serve you up so delicious iPhone only advertising. But AOL isn’t going to stop there, the optimized ads will then (hopefully only if you want to go) redirect your iPhone to sites specifically coded for the iPhone by the marketers.

It all sounds innocuous enough but when I’m using my iPhone I want regular version of the pages, not iPhone specific pages (I’m looking at you Amazon). It is easy to imagine this kind of thing getting out of hand and ruining the web for the iPhone. I haven’t tested it yet but I bet you can get the same experience on your Mac by firing up Safari, hitting… more...

Similar to the idea of one laptop per child, the American Association of Dentists is launching a new print campaign centered around Apple’s popular iPhone revolution.

The ad campaign is designed to encourage regular teeth cleaning while making a ridiculous spectacle out of the most profound innovation of 2007.

The marketing director off AAC, Maury Feingold, quotes,

“Teeth cleaning is a painfully boring subject that most people would rather ignore like Windows Vista, I wanted to make clean teeth exciting, memorable and sexy chic. iPhone was my quick-fix strategy, I think the new ads are fabulous.”

I must admit, by comparison the new ad is quite an improvement over the last AAD campaign that included disgusting close-up photos of horses with garbage in their teeth to promote flossing. However, using the iPhone as this particular ad campaign may have been an idea by a desperate person.

At the same time, I like that they have used my favorite device. More power to them!