Verizon Started the Anti-iPhone Campaign

23rd October, 2009 by Adina
Tags: iPhone, News, Verizon

An aggressive campaign directed against Apple was launched a few days ago. The campaign is concentrating on the missing features of the iPhone. The ad series is named “iDoesn’t” with the “iDevice” as a special target.

Baseball matches are a great opportunity to launch some incisive ads, as well as the NFL games on Sunday. But important things are likely to come in November, the campaign reaching its climax by then.

This campaign is tailored to draw customers towards the major launches at Verizon, which includes the BlackBerry Storm 2, the Samsung Omnia II and the HTC Desire Android-based. All these three smartphones are similar to the iPhone, but they have multitasking and application catalogs less restricted. Verizon outlined that its orientation to Android would not limit applications and Google Voice should be present together with other software that was supposed to be banned by Apple and AT&T.

Verizon’s campaign riffles Apple’s tagline to “There’s a map for that” claiming poor 3G coverage offered by AT&T. In the ad Verizon pretends to have five times more 3G coverage when compared to AT&T. AT&T has also been under fire for dropped calls, slow 3G network and spotty 3G coverage. In a recent survey, AT&T and Sprint were showed to be the worst network on the west coast. The $18 billion invested in AT&T’s cellular network are not generating results. Verizon’s ad campaign suggests to rather picking a network before picking a phone. And it’s very unlikely that Verizon will ever get iPhone on their network.

Verizon’s marketing experience against Apple was unfortunate, because even the mediatised launch of the BlackBerry Storm, which was supposed to draw a significant number of customers from iPhone, was successful in the beginning, but has sold much slower since October 2008.

Verizon also reiterated a Twitter update planned to carry the Palm Pre in the first part of 2010. In the past, the company has publicly expressed the intention of carrying this multi-touch webOS handset when Sprint’s exclusivity ends but has not committed to this smartphone until now. It is supposed to be a model functionally identical but there are no more release details.

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