Free private island from Sprint ~ only costs you $10.5 million for the BlackBerry
Sprint has done some really nice things with their “Sprint speed” light drawing campaign. I have been searching for signs of gratuitous paradise in their commercials for a while now, and they have pretty much avoided adding in the fluff of palm trees. The closest that I came to was a light-drawn sun as a weather forecast of 73 degrees and sunny, which they describe as “Mostly tank-toppy” weather. So it’s the warmth of summer without the assumption that you’re going to run off to the beach. Fair enough.
The drawings in the Sprint Speed ads are fun and compelling and relate to more than just the beach. The images jump around like Chalk 2.0–-kid-like visual hopscotch with the sophistication of the latest communications technology.
With all the success that they have had with this campaign at convincing the owners of the iPhone on AT&T that they are not on the fastest network (even though we don’t really seem to care), they were bound to want to push the marketing further. And now they have: Sprint will give you your own private island if you’re a billionaire who purchases the “world’s most expensive cell phone.” They have even created a new website for the campaign: www.privateislandoffer.com. Be sure to have your “Billionaire Identification Number” ready before you purchase.
Click the link for the higher-quality video, or watch the YouTube version here:
It’s a joke of course, but they have put in some pretty amusing bits in the video on. For example, the BlackBerry can serve as a disciplinary device for dumb helicopter pilots; the billionaire simply hits the pilot on the head with the device to get him to look at the GPS map. I laughed at the voice dial, with people making important connections with a single word: “President,” the “Queen,” and the dot-com guru who just wants “Pizza” while skiing on his home ski-track-mill (just a treadmill).
I’m going to guess that it will be a successful campaign, but it is mildly disappointing to me that the ultimate example that they can think of as a perq for enormously successful people is found in this statement from the video: “We think you’ll find controlling the world with this smart phone from your very own private island worth more than the price tag.”
This situation reminds me of a story that a professor once told our class. He was on a plane once, and the stranger sitting next to him assumed that he must be a very important person. The prof was, as always, dressed impeccably and probably looking very “bow-tie” Harvard or at least CEOish. After the plane landed, everybody around him pulled out their cell phones and began making calls. The professor remained calm with no phone emerging from his coat pocket. The stranger asked him, “Don’t you have some important calls to make on your cell phone?” The professor, probably mildly annoyed but amused nonetheless, replied, “I have people with cell phones to do that for me.”
This point is what Sprint is missing with this campaign. The cliche of the private island was not necessary to make the overall campaign work. So while I think that the jokes will carry the campaign to success, I think they should go back to their visually compelling and incredibly well differentiated Sprint speed campaign. For now, they have veered off their marketing path, as the Sprint speed lights don’t appear until the end of the video when the lights go buzzing around the phone with the little private island picture on it.
Overall, I have to give Sprint credit. I would even be a customer of theirs if they had had the iPhone.
At least they have traveled a long distance from their old logo and the “Fair and Flexible” campaigns of several years ago. Remember Wendy (below) who was to blame for going over on the family’s minutes but also the hero of the moment for recommending Sprint? This commercial had NOTHING to do with the beach whatsoever.
It has also not been terribly unusual in the past for BlackBerry to use the beach. Their current home page has rolling shots of different well-dressed people standing among seagulls, with the beach serving as the tie between business and people.
Both companies need to get back to what sets them apart both visually and technologically, or suffer the probably success of Apple and AT&T. Oh, wait…
My mistake? Maybe it is the technology.
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Posted on September 7, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Beaches, Commercials, Gadgets, Internet Advertising, Islands, Medium to Paradise, Sun, Technology, iPhone |
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[...] to what they put into it, they have been going back to the old island website that I mentioned in a post a while back. The banner you see above popped up on Forbes on an article about how Google is about to [...]
[...] to what they put into it, they have been going back to the old island website that I mentioned in a post a while back. The banner you see above popped up on Forbes on an article about how Google is about to [...]