It is possible but highly unlikely that you will recall @riverphonic’s tweet from a few months back saying something on the lines of “Jaded tech critics can be so tiresome. Can someone please just say, The iPad – Wow!”. Well, it looks like the verdict is in, now that the crowd has had a few days to hold it up to the light, shake it, clasp it to its collective bosom etc, and it seems to be favorable.
As barometers of public opinion go, the commercial breaks in hit TV shows rate high, and none more so than those interrupting Fox’s indefatigable 24. On Monday night’s buttock-clenching episode, the commercials ran like one continuous ironic metaphor of the state of the US economy, as if we are looking to wireless and software companies to rescue the markets while the auto industry collapses to Hyundai and nobody else bothers to show up. Granted this is a show where the hero spends 95% of his time either killing people or fiddling with his mobile phone, but with all the running around involved at least we might have seen Nike or Adidas getting in on the action.
Presumably they were simply outspent by the likes of Verizon, T Mobile and Sprint, about whose generic (should I say ‘commoditized’) ads I can, two days later, remember not a thing. Instead, Google/Motorola’s “Droid Does” campaign resonated highly with some top class creative that blended seamlessly with the show’s more high-tech moments. But the two that were clearly there to duke it out this week were Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle.
This is where a 30 second commercial can tell you more than all the tech and market analysis money can buy. Amazon’s ads were actually better than Apple’s. More inventive, wonderful artwork, large splashes of color which, sadly, highlighted the fact that the Kindle doesn’t have any. Both ads had rocking good sound tracks, though Apple’s was of course that little bit better. Let’s not forget, they didn’t reinvent the book recommendation business. They reinvented the music industry: not just how we find it and buy it, but how we store it, how we experience it. And that is what comes through with the iPad and why, in that commercial, there was no script, no voice-over. Just a video of a finger touching the screen and (taking a cue from Google’s Superbowl ad) guiding you through the experience, with an end caption “Meet the iPad”, disclosing all you need to know. As the first rule of screenwriting has it: Show, don’t tell.
We are already reading the competition’s publicity counter-strike. HP preparing its ‘iPad killer’ and 50 other similar stunts. The fact that they are talking about ‘iPad killers’ already must give Steve Jobs plenty of satisfaction. So HP’s new thing has got a USB port, has it? Do they really think that Apple isn’t holding this back for Versions 2 and 3, like they teach in Gizmo Marketing 101?
As a banker friend who is no slouch said yesterday, “I bought an iPad on the weekend, and I have to say, it’s the coolest thing I have ever owned.”
There can surely be no doubt that Jack Bauer, when reading state secrets and deciphering the circuitry of a nuclear weapon on the hop or while relaxing on his black suede heroin-chic recliner, would choose an iPad to do so. Owing to its smooth edges, he could also use it to hurl, Frisbee-like, across tenements and decapitate terrorists in the vital seconds before they execute their
coup de grace.