Verizon’s Droid: a display ad done right
Last weekend, the wife and I strolled to the Verizon store in the Mission and picked up his-n-hers Motorola Droids, Verizon’s first smart phone with Google’s Android OS.
So far, they’ve been great. Web surfing and Gmail are delightfully fast, and call quality is excellent. (Most importantly, we haven’t resigned ourselves to the black hole that is the AT&T mobile network.) iPhone and BlackBerry owners have known this for years, but it’s a remarkable experience to walk around with a pocket-sized computer far more powerful than the tower case that sat under your desk just a few years ago.
As I was surfing the web this morning, I spotted this ad on the Knowledge@Wharton ad. And I was kind of blown away.
Within a standard 300 x 250 display unit (what we called an “L-REC” at Yahoo!) is a feed of punchy editorial links about the Droid. Scroll down, and you’ll see what looks like dozens if not hundreds of posts from news sites, magazines, and blogs. Topics include:
- Positive reviews of the Droid
- Upbeat news about the Droid launch
- Top apps for Android devices
- Downbeat news about the iPhone, including viruses and developer disaffection with the Apple App Store
- Information about the Droid Eris, HTC’s lighter version
All the links click to the original articles, with a toolbar to Tweet or see more.
The display ad hits on a number of strong points:
- It’s targeted
- It’s interactive
- It gives me a choice of compelling content to click
- It lives on beyond the click
- It encourages me to share
- It includes links to add this Droid feed to Facebook or Twitter
What could be better about it? A few things. If I weren’t already interested in the Droid, I wouldn’t be drawn to it, or bother to scroll. I also suspect this ad wouldn’t test well on a site where people weren’t coming to engage in the act of reading. I can also only see two headlines on the first screen, and the gray-on-black scrollbar could be more obvious.
But in general, it’s great to see such a compelling and innovative ad that so precisely built for an audience and an experience. More, please!