On Wednesday, in the pre-July 4th holiday edition of The Wall Street Journal, Motorola (a Google Company) had a full-page ad on the back of the first section touting the forthcoming Moto X smartphone with an emphasis on “Designed by you. Assembled in the USA.”
July 3rd Journal Ads
In that same “A” section, pages 8 & 9 had Apple’s 2-pager with the tag line, “Designed by Apple in California.” Apple’s print is part of the campaign mentioned here a few weeks ago.
Motorola’s print ad, the first from Droga5 (Yet again! Turning out to be a favorite agency of ours), is the first for Google-owned Motorola, a print ad touting the made-in-the-USA credentials of the forthcoming Moto X smartphone.
According to Adweek, independent agency Droga5 is handling lead creative responsibilities for the brand previously handled by Omnicom’s Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. They scored the business without a pitch. Talk about striking while the iron is hot. Good for Motorola (Google)!
Circling back to the placement of these ads, we see a few things.
a) Moto is clearly positioning itself vs. Apple. Designed in California, we all know of the manufacturing issues they’ve had with Foxconn in China.
b) Apple’s campaign is clearly trying to gain an upper hand on Samsung, a company that earned a lot of “street cred” poking fun at Apple.
c) Also notable: Samsung ad spend was $881 million in 2012. They outspent everyone in percentage terms.
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AWSI Questions / Ponderables:
- Will consumers make buying decisions based on what’s cool or where a product is designed/manufactured or other criteria?
- Will the effort to win the hearts and minds of the consumer make a difference?
It’ll be interesting to monitor this story through the end of 2013.
And if you are curious, here are the latest rankings according to Phonedog.com.
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Source: Statista
Stay curious my friends!
GigaOm’s Kevin C. Tofel said, “Making a patriotic plea around the July 4 holiday is a smart move for the company, particularly when you realize that Google is U.S.-based and all of its Android hardware partners are overseas companies. Patriotism aside, very little is known about the Moto X other than it’s supposed to include a range of devices and offer personalized customization options.”
http://gigaom.com/2013/07/02/motorolas-patriotic-ad-focuses-on-us-roots-and-moto-x-phone-you-design-yourself/
Annie just told us Google hired Samsung consumer marketing exec Brian Wallace as VP of global marketing at Motorola in December 2012.