Verizon Thunderbolt will empower, baffle you

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXkqpul38wE&feature=player_embedded#at=12

 

I have watched this advertisement for the Verizon Thunderbolt several times now, and all I can say about the actual phone is that it looks hard to charge. Those of you who have seen The Daily Show or a Shia LaBeouf movie in the past three months will recognize this latest in a series of tone-deaf Verizon commercials that present the smartphone as an alien product that smashes trees and evokes submissive awe in rural people. Like that spot—in which a young man waits eagerly for his new phone to arrive and, once he actually gets it, decides to hurl it as far away as possible—this commercial manages to capture my two main fears about any new smartphone:

1) I have to charge it for eight hours every 16 hours.

2) It may provide evidential proof that I am some sort of douchebag.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Let us first address the first concern—brought to market by Apple via the original iPhone, which contained a hidden feature that would allow you to listen to “All My Friends” and make a phone call* without plugging it in. This approach to battery consumption became the model for subsequent touch-screen phones, particularly the various Droids: turn off push email, turn off WiFi, don’t watch any video and maybe you’ll make it to bar close. The decision to make this industry problem the industry standard was, in many ways, a clever one, since the smartphone is marketed to those young people who are just old enough to stop going home with people who don’t have smartphone chargers. Yet it remains stunning that Verizon, in constructing this commercial, failed to recognize the number-one negative public perception about their product.

Okay, maybe number two. The number-one negative public perception about touch-screen smartphones is that you only think you need one because you are a jerkoff. Besides snarky remarks from ex-girlfriends, the best evidence of this proposition can be found in the universal willingness of national political figures—q.v. Palin, Sarah and Obama, President—to admit that they are addicted to their…Blackberries. They just can’t miss that important email from 2007,* apparently.

It’s possible that national political commenters and chiefs of the executive branch don’t have access to top-of-the-line consumer electronics, but it’s also possible they recognize that John F. Public is not entirely comfortable with the new shit. If we were to mark a dividing line between “email phone, fancy” and “email phone, scary,” we might draw it between buttons and touch screen. That’s what separates a phone that does extra stuff from a Status Phone. And as pop culture has reminded us since cell phones became ubiquitous, you must not have a Status Phone.

This creates a problem for marketers, since the smartphone industry is almost pure status. One can still question the utility of the regular cell phone, to say nothing of the phone that alerts you to changes in your Facebook wall and lets you watch movies in 3.5″ by 2.5″ panorama. Most of us do not need that, and yet we want it because some dude in California invented it. The trick, then is to have like the third-best cell phone available. It still makes you feel like you’re living in the future, but not a future in which everyone including you is a technophilic decadent.

If we accept this asymptotic theory of the motive behind phone consumption, then Verizon’s new Thunderbolt commercial takes exactly the wrong tack. Somewhere there is a person who wants to reach in his pocket and pull out an alien device that necessitated the rewiring of several city blocks during an oddly windless thunderstorm, but around him are ten people who hate that guy. If Verizon really wants to sell Thunderbolts—and by the way, that’s why the Pontiac Firebird only sold to 28 year-old males, too—it should show us Tim Pawlenty pausing to read an email in his canoe. The email is from his daughter, and it’s a picture of her new puppy. We’re not selling the future here, people. We’re selling the idea that it’s okay to live there.

Combat! blog is free. Why not share it?
Tweet about this on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on Reddit

1 Comments

  1. But you forgot the best reason TO get a status phone. Namely: “If you don’t have an iPhone, well, you don’t have an iPhone.”

    What awful commercials.

Leave a Comment.