Media ShopTalk:   w/c 10 May 2010

For the most of us, the word iPad means very little.  There are a few people however to whom it means the world and they just have to have one!   Richard Lord, one of our Associate Media Directors, shares how advertising made him go out and buy a new iPad in this week’s newsletter.  And yes – you may well have read it last week on MediaOnline.   

This is just in case you missed it! Feels just like I’m falling for the first time!

BBC News reported yesterday that thanks to all the prelaunch media hype, Apple has sold over 1 million iPads in just 4 weeks. This got me thinking about a conversation that I had with my boss the other day when I showed him my own shiny new Apple iPad which had recently arrived from the States. He asked me what it did and the best way I could explain it to him was that it was like a giant iPhone…but without the phone and without 3G. “But you’ve already got an iPhone” he said, “why do you need this as well”? And there it was. Why did I need it? Was it better than my iPhone? No. Could it do more than my iPhone? No. Sure it’s got a bigger screen and more memory but I’ve been using my iPhone (with its small screen and limited capacity) for answering e-mails, watching videos, listening to music, surfing the web and tweeting and skyping for years. So what exactly did I need an iPad for? Well because it was new! Because it was shiny! Because it was from Apple! Because Steve Jobs said I needed one! Since his Steveness first showed the iPad to the world on the 27th of January, there has been an absolute frenzy of iPad news and discussion on blogs and online forums, in tech and gadget magazines, and there have been thousands of column centimetres dedicated to it in newspapers the world over. If you haven't heard about the iPad then you've clearly been living in Outer Mongolia for the last three months.

With all this media hype it's little wonder that 300,000 units were sold on the first day. Advertisers have known for years the power of advertising and media. They know that media is pervasive and that it informs and influences me. They know that they can use it to get me to want things that I didn't even know I needed. But just how powerful is it? Well consider this...isn’t it funny how marketers can take something that’s existed for ages, repackage it and brand it as the new, “must-have” item, and we all believe it just because they say so? We don’t see that in actual fact it’s exactly the same thing that we probably all already have three of. Think about memory sticks, flash drives and portable hard disks. They are all the same thing, just rebranded and remarketed.

You'd think people would see through it but the two flash disks and three portable hard drives on my desk at home beg to differ. And what about digital cameras and camcorders? Nowadays they both take mega pixel digital still images and they both record high-definition video. Again, they’re exactly the same thing, just cleverly rebranded, repackaged, and sold all over again to an unsuspecting public. It’s should be so obvious to us – after all we’re sophisticated consumers. We’ve been around the block a few times. So why then do I have a digital still camera and a digital video camera in my camera bag? I don’t know, maybe I am just a sucker for shiny things but perhaps there’s something to this advertising thing after all!

The Quote of the Week: “Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road”.

Stewart Brand <http://www.famous-quotes.com/author.php?aid=938>

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