How Verizon’s iDon’t commercial should have been

by Justin Horn on Oct 19th, 2009 @ 3:18 pm

Just found this YouTube video of an old Sega commercial on Daring Fireball showing “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t”. I’m sure you notice the similarities to the new Verizon, “iDon’t commercial” I discussed yesterday.

Yesterday I said:

I find it interesting that all the iPhone ads show what the iPhone iCan, while Verizon is all about the iDon’t.

Yes, the end result of the commercial was the same as Verizon’s, a direct jab at their competition, but Sega approached in the way I thought Verizon should have. Instead of showing all the things “Droid can”, they choose the inverse approach by showing what the iPhone can’t. If the Droid can do all the things iPhone can’t, then let’s see it!

Another side effect of this inverse approach is something The iPhone blog found after doing a quick survey of their non tech savvy friends:

TiPb asked a few non-geek friends and most of them didn’t even realize Verizon was targeting the iPhone in these ads (some thought the commercial was saying whatever device they were talking about didn’t do the things listed). Is that an ad-failure, or was it deliberately targeting geeks?

This idea of “inverse” is really what I meant by a “negative ad campaign” in my post yesterday…not that going head to head with your competition is a bad thing. The first thing someone that disagrees with me would bring up are the Mac vs PC ads, but I see them as more of the Sega style. They discuss what the Mac can do in direct comparison to where Windows OS falls short.  See for yourself in the video below.

Follow me on Twitter @justin_horn

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1. iDon’t vs iCan: Verizon’s Droid vs Apple’s iPhone | When Will Apple?

   October 19th, 2009 3:25 pm

   [...] Related Post How Verizon’s iDon’t commercial should have been [...]

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