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What The Banned iPhone Ad Should Really Look Like
Barence writes "To demonstrate just how misleading the latest (and now banned) iPhone television ad really is, PC Pro has recreated it using an iPhone 3G and a Wi-Fi connection — with laughable results. Apple was forced to pull the advert today after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) decided it exaggerated the speed of mobile browsing. 'In the 30-second clip the iPhone is shown loading a webpage, finding its current location in Google Maps, opening a PDF from an email and finally taking a phone call. The ASA concluded that the iPhone cannot do what was shown in the mere 29 seconds afforded in the advert, ruling that it was misleading.' Try it for yourself and you'll undoubtedly agree."
The commercial is done by the time they finish with Google.
Maybe if they'd put a warning similar to "screen images simulated, not really an iphone, 5x speed, etc." it wouldn't have been pulled.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
There's a similar advert for the app store here in the UK. It has some guy instantly downloading and using games, location software and so on. It has an amusing "actual sequence speeded up" disclaimer at the bottom, rather like those cosmetics adverts that say "some post-processing done on model".
Why don't they just say "this advert is a total lie, but it looks pretty and you're a gullible moron, so buy buy buy!"
What bugs me about the app store advert is that it finishes saying "this is going to change everything!" No, it isn't - it's another incremental improvement on smart phones, which is quite similar to many competing products. Ever since I found out about the reality distortion field I've started noticing that Apple try to use this in all their advertising.
You're telling me there's an organization that actually checks advertisements for false and misleading information, and has the power to pull blatant lies off the air? When did this happen?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Who doesn't? Went to Wendy's the other day and got a #2 combo because it looked pretty awesome on the order board. Got back to the office and opened it up to discover something pretty gross looking, a mash of squashed bun and grey meat. Yum. This isn't a rare case, and is pretty much the norm of advertising.
Are you as awesome as your resume paints you to be?
Advertisements not telling the truth.
Next up: Giant footsteps in Alaska not done by Yetis - Signs of prehistoric giantmice found.
Just to clarify, if the Apple advert says "Fast browsing" then you will most likely focus on the time it takes to browse in the advert, so it isn't immediately obvious that that might not be "true".
On the other hand, it's pretty easy to guess that you couldn't fix a light in another building from your phone. And that a Citroen C4 doesn't transform into a dancing robot
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
Uh their ad showed it to be 4x as good as it really is. If i went to wendys and got a 1/16th pounder i'd be pretty pissed. If on my resume I said I could build a bathroom to finished in 4hours they would likely be disappointed. Beyond that their speed was the WHOLE advertisement.
It is the norm. It should not be.
I believe that the standard should be that the advertisement must show an accurate representation of the average product as it will be delivered to the consumer. To do otherwise, is fraud.
That includes Wendy's and all the rest of the fast-food crowd. In fact, pretty much all food advertising. (Many years ago the Wall Street Journal had a very funny article about making food adverts. Jello was mixed at several times the usual concentration to keep it solid under the lights. Tensions got high on the set and someone hurled a jello chunk at someone else. The other person ducked and the jello rebounded off the wall like a superball.)
How about stores? I sure wish the nearby Safeway were bright, clean and open instead of old, dingy and cramped.
The before/after pics for weight-loss schemes would be pretty funny.
Oh, sorry. Lost myself for a moment there. Forgot that it is our Patriotic Duty to buy into the advertising fantasies in order to keep the economic fantasy growing.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Just to make sure I have this right, do you mean to imply that telling people how they should express themselves is not combative and does not make you look like a "dink"? Or is this more of an "it's okay when I do it" situation?
I think the only reason why Apple might appear exceptional is because they were required to pull the ads. Normally advertisers use various propaganda techniques to give a certain impression that may be true or false but they do it without actually making verifiably false statements. They might say "9 out of 10 dentists recommend brand X toothpaste!" instead of "9 out of 10 dentists recommend brand X toothpaste after we paid them a large amount of money!" even though both would be true and even though they only asked 10 individuals instead of doing anything remotely like a proper study of a representative sample.
I very much like your idea about fast-food advertisements. I don't think the burgers in the ads are even edible most of the time (lots of plastic or other things you really wouldn't want to eat) although I regret that I don't have a source/reference handy. Advertising in general, or at least the way it is currently done, is something that I believe a more enlightened society would view as either a great evil or at least a corrupting influence. It's a happy smiling face on what is straight up manipulation and the power of its influence is often underestimated. If it were otherwise, then why the need to exaggerate, misrepresent, and selectively omit facts (not just talking about Apple)?
Healthy people who can think for themselves don't need to be constantly told what to eat, what to drink, where to go, what to buy, for whom to vote, etc. They just need to know what their options are, which is a far simpler affair. To give what I hope isn't a bad analogy, it would be more like "client pull" and less like "server push". I consider obsolete or irrelevant any business model that would collapse if this were the norm, no matter how large or widespread it may be.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
If the advert said "Blackberry Storm - remotely fixes neon lights", then yes - the ad would be pulled. Apple says "look how quick this phone is", when it isn't anywhere near as quick as they say. That is clearly lying - not inferring some obviously impossible functionality, but straight-up lying about the ability of their handset.
Okay, that was BS.
I'm certain that Apple sped things up for the commercial. Big whoop. But I would have been a lot more sympathetic if PC Pro had done anywhere near a realistic comparison.
The ad starts with the phone unlocked, and the user opening Safari to a pre-loaded page. The fumbling PC Pro fingers slowly unlock the phone and go to Google to find the page, rather than even entering the URL or opening a bookmark!
How about a realistic comparison? I'd like to see how fast the iPhone can work, not how slow your damn sausage-fingers are at molesting it.
WARNING: iPhone 3G browsing speeds may be impeded if you're an idiot.
Maybe it's meant to reflect the actual user experience, but they spend a lot more time diking around with websites than the iPhone add. They load two webpages instead of one, and spend time scrolling around those webpages, where as the add merely shows the phone zooming in. They also enter the URL manually, while the add shows them only loading a link. They also spend time scrolling around the PDF document, while in the add the user receives a call immediately after the PDF has loaded. Not to mention that they obviously used different sites and files. They also started from the unlock screen instead of the home screen. You can't call something a recreation if you didn't even try to recreate the add.
Why didn't they actually try to recreate the add ? The iPhone is obviously not that fast over a 3G network (though it is that fast over a 802.11 connection in my experience). What is it about journalists that makes them think they need to exaggerate things that are already plenty bad?
It's an ad about a $200+ phone, demonstrating how fast the phone is, but the performance displayed was beyond what the phone is physically capable of.
I don't think the burger comparison is even worth pursuing; that was a $5 burger at a fast food outlet, and theoretically an employee who took the time to make a good one could have given you a burger that looked like the advertised one.
It's more like if Dell advertised a laptop with hardware specs from 2 years ago and showed it playing Crysis at 40fps. When you got home and your frame rate was 10fps you wouldn't think "oh it's just an ad, I should have expected them to exaggerate the performance"
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