Comment by cscotta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cscotta | Hacker News Reader

It really is a shame that so much of the Android marketing has taken its cue from Verizon's techno-masculine Droid branding.

Google was dead on with the Nexus One's "Web Meets Phone" ad. If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching - right at the center of Google's brief expressive / cute / minimalist advertising phase. Think back to the "Parisian Love" Super Bowl ad and the Motion Theory "Google Chrome" short. They're delightful.

These shorts present Google as a very different company - one that's personal, bright, and helpful. Much of this work is coming from (or commissioned by) a division called Creative Lab that's largely independent from the majority of Google's culture and management structure. I had the pleasure of collaborating with them on a couple projects and was amazed by their creativity, insight, and lighthearted approach.

I would love to see more work in this style from Google. They've demonstrated they're perfectly capable of creating very good ads that deliver a consistently solid impression, but have ceded much of the opportunity to brand Android to carriers who have screwed it up to the nines (though we shouldn't forget that the platform is actually called "Android"), with the lone exception of HTC's highly personal commercials.

I hope they can turn it around. If and when they do, I further hope that it will be a part of a more comprehensive strategy to rebrand Android as a whole. It's a solid platform with a lamentably robotic image.

---

[1] Nexus One ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6COwgigJ-g

[2] Parisian Love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU

[3] Motion Theory's "Chrome": http://vimeo.com/5721933

I don't know much about advertising, but could this be on purpose? That is, an attempt to create the impression in the market that the Droid is the powerful, bold, masculine device, and so by implication (certainly never stated directly) that the iPhone is the rounded, feminine device. I don't have a marketer's sense about why that'd be an agenda item, but I could guess it may be a tried-and-true PR advertising technique -- if you're coming from behind, try to create an identity issue around the decision that will get you the fraction of the market you think you can get.

I think if you try, you can see analogues to this strategy in Apple's marketing, especially when it was famously coming from behind in the "I'm a Mac" ads. By attempting to segment the market -- "If you're a serious older person, PCs are for you, but if you're a young hipster, the Mac is your natural choice." -- they attempted to artificially create this sort of identity-based split in preference.

Again, I'm not a marketer, so I don't know if this is standard playbook or just reading more into what I see. I don't even know if this stuff works, but based on Apple fans' statements, it seems to me the message that they should think of themselves as a young, hip, enlightened minority who "just get it" and have great fashion sense seems to have taken root pretty well.

Doesn't seem to be hurting Google to much, with over 200,000 devices activated per day, if the CEO is to be believed.

Google's spots are certainly brighter and happier, but still not quite as humanistic as Apple's advertising. OK, "Parisian Love" is redeemed by the sappy love story, but out of all three videos the only thing I saw or heard of an actual human being was a disembodied voice giving the phone voice commands. Other than that, the Nexus One spot was just an animated feature list with electronic music--still pretty robotic, even if it's a bright and happy robot.

Apple's very first iPhone ads had a real human voice talking to you and a real human hand operating the iPhone. And before that, their iconic iPod ads had human bodies dancing. People respond to the human form better than they respond to facts or figures or even the most beautiful industrial design.

Here's Apple's FaceTime ad. There's more human beings in the first frame than in all three Google ads put together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k

But even before that, here's an iPhone ad. Note the key difference: there's a dude talking to you and you see actual human hands operate the phone. It's not some abstract robotic thing, it's something meant for humans: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhhbaaWBgnk

And I'm sure you've seen the old iPod ads, but again--the focus is "iPods shuffle help human beings enjoy music", not "iPods shuffle have this feature list": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE4EEwQAfxo

Interesting background, I didn't realize Creative Lab worked on that campaign. It's certainly an improvement on Google's usual branding efforts and I totally agree that that's a better direction, but I think it still misses the mark in some ways. They want to pull on your heart strings, and yet the whole time you are stuck staring at a browser window. If the message was supposed to be human-centered rather than the Droid-style technology-centered, like "Your life is what's important, Google can help you", why did they stick the technology in your face for 100% of the time? Instead of showing the human side, it's almost like they unintentionally made an ad about fear of technology: you spend all your time staring at a screen missing real life. Who knows, maybe this is Creative Labs opinion of Google's culture.

This is unlike Apple's FaceTime ads, which also play on the same emotions, but that ad succeeds because it's set inside the human world. Facebook tried something similar with Places (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfX_ZQag1BM), trying to connect the technology with very strong emotions, nostalgia, etc. They did show a lot of real life scenes, but I think it also failed. They're selling the idea that Places helps you have serendipitous meetings with your "facebook friends", i.e. casual acquaintances you generally don't share those kinds of strong emotions with. It's completely incongruous for Facebook to try to brand itself around what are fairly private emotions that you usually reserve for only your most intimate relationships, especially after basically forcing everyone into public mode and declaring privacy dead.

I think you're right. They're selling features rather than benefits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com