Two days ago, Verizon posted their first iPhone teaser commercial to their YouTube page. The tagline? “It begins.” Now, it looks as if Apple is ready to follow suit with its own marketing muscle. But they’re not just playing up the Verizon iPhone, but rather the fact that it’s now on two networks in the U.S. The tagline for this one? “Two is better than one.”
The 30-second clip below was posted to YouTube today. It’s a fairly standard iPhone ad with a hand holding up an iPhone 4 in front of a white background. Except in this commercial, there are two iPhone 4’s side-by-side. As Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz plays, the dueling iPhones perform the same tasks in the same way — though there are differences in the pictures being looked at, and the websites being visited, etc. Then the focus shifts to one the devices to show off iPhone 4’s features. Then it’s back to the two phones, culminating in a side-by-side FaceTime conversation. The phones are then removed, revealing both AT&T and Verizon logos. Then the tagline is put up. Then the iPhone 4 logo.
This type of commercial makes perfect sense for Apple. Since AT&T is still a vital partner for the device, Apple can’t afford to alienate them by putting out Verizon iPhone-only commercials. It’s the same reason why it was Verizon, and not Apple, that led the announcement of the device earlier this month.
Further, the commercial works because Apple emphasizes that the device on the different networks are the same, you just have a choice now. That’s not entirely true, since the Verizon iPhone won’t be able to do talking & surfing at the same time (insert the joke about the AT&T iPhone not being able to do calls at all), but all the core iPhone features will be the same.
One thing not touted in the commercial is the Personal Hotspot feature. Verizon still hasn’t announced the pricing for this, and Apple still hasn’t confirmed that it will come to AT&T also with a future iOS upgrade (though it seems like it will be the case).