Arthur C. Clarke once famously wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. One corollary to that might be that any sufficiently advanced advertising is also indistinguishable from magic.
Three new video spots for the iPhone 3G have appeared—as if by sufficiently advanced technology—on Apple’s website. They harken back to Apple’s first run of ads for the iPhone, focusing on showing off what you can do with your shiny new multi-hundred dollar box.
The first spot, Everyone, runs through all the nifty things that people might want to do “twice as fast”: surf the Web, download files, locate yourself, etc. But when it came to that last line: “but pretty much everybody will like paying…”, I have to admit that my mind automatically filled in “…$10 more per month.” Ouch.
Unslow is pretty much the same as Everyone, except it frames the ad from the perspective of “What is 3G?” But otherwise, it uses almost the exact same copy. Yes. We get it. The iPhone 3G is twice as fast. Ooooh.
The last spot, Work Friendly actually looks at features of the iPhone 2.0 software, particularly its work capabilities. While it doesn’t mention either MobileMe or Exchange by name, there’s a heavy use of “push” (which, as you might recall, Apple said it would stop using to describe all of MobileMe’s services). And given the repeated emphasis on “work”, it would seem to be the enterprise features that they’re…er…pushing.
Not that Apple even needs advertising for the iPhone 3G—they still can’t make the things fast enough to keep up with the demand. But by all means, let’s throw fuel on the fire twice as fast.