By now, you've all probably seen at
least one
or two
of Palm's new commercials for the Palm Pre (or one of the popular
parodies). Instead of getting to the point of talking about the
Pre's features in brief little snippets, the ghostly female
protagonist often goes on about jugglers and reincarnation in a
creepy, monotonous voice.
Whereas Apple's iPhone 3G S ads often
talk about features like speech recognition, copy/paste, and faster
computing speeds to generate buzz, the man behind Palm's new
advertising push, Modernista's Gary Koepke, thinks that the “creep”
factor in the commercials is enough to keep people buzzing about the
Palm Pre according to Advertising Age.
"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,” said Koepke. “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."
"There's nobody involved in an
iPhone ad, and 'Your life is on BlackBerry' -- isn't that great?
Instead of having a life? We wanted a middle ground between those two
places -- what about the people who want a really great smartphone,"
Koepke continued.
The Palm Pre is seen by many as the
first real challenger to Apple's dominate iPhone in the consumer
smartphone market. Analysts estimate that Palm sold
roughly 300,000 Pre's in June, but it still wasn't enough to keep
mobile phone service provider Sprint from losing
250,000 customers in Q2.
