advertising addresses information overload

I saw an ad for HTC Phones the other night.  I’d never heard of them before (I blame it on a limited attention economy that prevents me from checking in on CNET as often as I should).  The minute-long spot I saw from their “You are Different” campaign caught me by surprise.  It’s a series of stylized vignettes culled from the diverse breadth of the human experience: working late at the office, seeing a live show, a solo traveler returning home, a sentimental moment with some music, a lovesick dude, a fighting couple, high school girls sharing a laugh–each episode or emotion facilitated and mediated by an HTC device.  “You don’t need to get a phone, you need a phone that gets you. And you. And you. And you.”

A simple, quick, clear, and compelling advertisement, to be sure.  What’s most salient about HTC’s campaign is the ‘realness’ with which they choose to portray the role of technology/information access in our accelerated lifestyles, that is, the good times as well as the bad.  Yeah, phones help us stay connected to loved ones, be more productive, and, increasingly, allow us to both produce and consume more and more information and media.  But the HTC ad attempts to depict the lived experience of technology in a media-saturated context, and acknowledges that phones can be the bearers of bad news, mitigate our privacy, stress us out, offset a work/life balance, and generally contribute to a world that can feel more complicated than it ever has before.

Not long after the HTC spot aired, I saw another similar advertisement for Microsoft’s Bing search ‘decision’ engine. The tech-critique of the “Search Overload Sydrome” series is delivered with a dose of humor. When a simple question comes up in conversation (a wife asking her husband if he purchased their plane tickets to Hawaii, a woman asking her pregnant friend about prenatal dietary restrictions), respondants afflicted with Search Overload Syndrome spew forth a jumble of tangentially related news results, travel tips, recipes, definitions and classifieds  results, much to the consternation of their befuddled interlocutor.  “What has search overload done to us?” the narrator asks.  What indeed.

Does the partially unflattering nature of ‘internet realism’ provide an arable context for the marketing of tech products and services?  Clearly, representations of the messy end-user realities of web 3.0 are required if Bing is to be marketed as the antidote to an overabundance of information.  For HTC, their “we-get-your-lifestyle-and-subsequently-your-love/hate-relationship-with-technology” strategy is a little more subtle, a little more disingenuous.

Internet/tech realism in advertising is complex and creepy but also compelling.  I guess there’s something universalizing and humbling in the frustration of an HTTP 404 File Not Found error message, in checking your phone compulsively for a response to that loaded text you sent, and wading through pages and pages of “not it” looking for any shard of text from a search result that looks promising. This is a reality that nobody is immune from: not me, not the CEO of HTC, not the editor of the Bing spot, not the actors, and not you.(…and you…and you…and you)

I wonder if this is a sign of tech marketing moving beyond an imagined internet utopia where there’s a widget for anything that ails you and perpetual connectivity is paramount?  I’m looking forward to more media and marketing that addresses real issues experienced by the real consumers of their products and services.