Best Oscar Commercial? Who else: Apple

Authored by Scott Goldberg on February 25, 2007 - 9:13pm.

As they are for the Super Bowl, new (and pricey) commercials are synonymous with the Oscars. And in a night of varying success in that regard, the winner was Apple with its “Hello” commercial, the first iPhone television ad. What separated it from other Apple launches was the element of surprise; the viewer didn’t know the ad’s product until the end, when the iPhone appeared. But it did so without showing the Apple logo and the iPhone name, the message being: You already know this phone’s name and the company that makes it. And they were right.

The commercial played like the quintessential Oscar feature, well edited at high speed with stock footage of movies new and old, that upon the first airing you didn’t realize it was an ad. Apple never fails in its commercial ventures, and with each new addition, the expectations grow. Disappointing its fans (and even those who loathe the company), is not in its nature.

The beginning of the iPhone marketing campaign is off and running. By the time June rolls around and the product hits the market, the smart money says the world will be ready to adopt.

Scott Goldberg

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Comments

Their logo

Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on February 26, 2007 - 8:46am.

Um... they sure did show their logo at the end.

Killer App for the iPhone (and Leopard)?

Submitted by Al Feldzamen (not verified) on February 26, 2007 - 11:07am.

Both Leopard and the iPhone are scheduled to appear very soon this spring. Leopard might well be thought of in synch with the forthcoming iPhone. What the phone truly needs to succeed, in view of its obvious disadvantages (high price, limitation to Cingular, small memory for music/video, lack of voice dialing, etc.) is a KILLER APP.

Such an app could well be DICTATION-OCR SOFTWARE (since a microphone is already present, and a stripped down OS X) . . . software that would let a user dictate an outgoing Email, or text that could go into a rudimentary word processor (like TEXTEDIT), and thence to a memory file or, by any one of several means, to a printer if desired.

Then that device, trademark issues permiting, could be renamed the POCKET MAC!

And then that software could well be incorporated into LEOPARD, which would give it the boost needed to stand out as more than a slight improvement over TIGER, and a most worthy competitor to Vista!

Killer App - Probably Not

Submitted by L Givens (not verified) on February 26, 2007 - 7:20pm.

For a killer app to be "killer", it must appeal to great numbers of people who can't live without it. How many people own a digital voice recorder? If you're not in grad school or a lawyer who's typing adverse, not much of a market. The iPhone itself is a killer app. The seamless integration of it's pieces makes it a killer app. Remote access (VNC or Apple Remote Access) would server many more than just a voice to text recorder.