This Isn’t How You Win The Marketing War For The One, HTC, All James Van Der Beek Aside

HTC promised it would be spending more on marketing efforts to ditch the “quietly brilliant” tagline and come up with something with more pop, but it couldn’t have gone much worse than the video above. Kudos to signing on Dawson’s Creek and Internet meme star James Van Der Beek, but -1,000 for making such little use of his comedic talents in this dismal Bachelor parody.

To his credit, Van Der Beek gets the only almost funny moments in the whole embarrassing affair (around the 1:50 mark) but even the under-appreciated lead from The Rules of Attraction can’t make up for what is really a desperately unfunny script based on an exceedingly painful premise.

Matt recently wrote that making the perfect smartphone with The One isn’t enough for HTC – it has to nail the marketing game, which rival Samsung has actually gotten pretty good at. The One with James Van Der Beek at least indicates HTC is stepping up to the plate, but this is a big, big whiff and we’re down to the bottom of the last inning. I may actually have preferred HTC “quietly brilliant” than “loudly unfunny.”