There’s a commercial on TV for the Palm Pre that’s been playing since the weekend it was released. It caught my attention because it was techie-looking and it showed the FaceBook logo, but I had no idea what I was looking at or what it was advertising until the end of the commercial (well, I thought it was a FaceBook commercial). Then they mention that the Web OS “lives in realtime” and it “constantly updates multiple live applications”. I have a pretty good idea of what all that means because I’m in the technology business and I’ve read articles about the device. But when I first listed to the commercial, even I was asking myself, “say what?” I can just imagine the giant whooshing noise of this going over everyone else’s head.
Contrast this to Apple’s “There’s an App for that” series of commercials. You clearly know that each commercial is about the iPhone right away. Each app profile quickly defines a problem then shows clearly how the app solves that problem. And each commercial shows about 3 apps, reinforcing each time just how useful the iPhone can be in a way than an average person can easily comprehend.
If Palm wants to sell the Pre to a market larger than techies, they had better start making some better commercials.
