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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/04/droid_pretty_ad_disses_iphone/

Motorola's banana-mutilation ad disses iPhone

¿Que es muy macho? ¡El Moto Droid!

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco

Posted in Mobile, 4th December 2009 21:57 GMT

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Motorola's latest ad for its Droid smartphone could reveal the company's choice of target market: men insecure about their virility.

In fast-cutting music-video style, the "Pretty" ad shows the Jaws of Life [1] tearing through sheet metal, a missile thrusting towards its target, and a bandanna-masked faux gang-banger pelting a metrosexual mannequin with paint balloons.

Possibly the most overtly Freudian image is that of a power saw obliterating a poor defenseless banana and splattering its juices into the ad viewer's face like...well...use you own fervid imagination.

All of this ultraviolence is accompanied by a manly man's voiceover that's worthy of being quoted in its entirety, to wit:

Should a phone be pretty?
Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty-pageant queen?
Or should it be fast?
Race-horse-duct-taped-to-a-scud missile fast?
We say the latter.
So we built the phone that does.
Does rip through the web like a circular saw through a ripe banana.
Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone?
In truth, no.
It's not a princess.
It's a robot.
A phone that trades hairdo for can-do.

If there's even the slightest doubt of the identity of the aforementioned "tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty-pageant queen," that uncertainty is dispelled by the ad's opening image, which mimics the cylindrical lucite case in which the original iPhone was displayed at its coming-out party [2] in January 2007 - a mockery certainly not lost on the attentive Apple fanboi.

iPhone introduction at Macworld Expo 2007

The iPhone's introduction at Macworld Expo 2007 (credit: Cnet)

Motorola Droid

The dissed princess phone in Motorola's "Pretty" ad - notice any similarities?

Moto's testosterone-fueled smash 'em, bash 'em ad blitz appears to be working - among half the population, at least. According to a recent report [3] in Engadget, the BrandIndex trend watch compiled by the brand trackers at YouGuv shows that men 18 and over are taking Moto's macho message to heart - or, maybe, to some other portion of their anatomy. As Apple's share of masculine brand loyalty is sinking, Moto's is rising.

But the campaign is clearly a gamble. The "Pretty" ad takes potent potshots not only at metrosexuality - and, it takes little image-decoding to determine, homosexuality as well - but also at women. Enticing half of one's market with strong imagery is one thing, but insulting an equally broad swath of the check-writing public is dicey at best.

It's not immediately clear why Motorola has chosen to paint itself into such a tight corner. Reviews of the Droid have been mixed, but generally favorable. Although greybeard Stewart Alsop may have branded it as "truly terrible [4]", the majority of the punditocracy have sided with either PC Magazine, which called it a "powerful new competitor [5]" to the iPhone, or Ars Technica, which in its typically exhaustive manner took six pages to decide that the Droid is "good enough [6]".

But maybe we at The Reg are over-analyzing what is, after all, merely 30 seconds of "made you look." Watch the full ad, and decide for yourself:

Even after repeated viewings, that banana burst still makes us feel a wee bit uncomfortable. Maybe buying a Droid would make us feel more secure. ®