• Ad Age, Tuesday, October 20, 2009 10:43 AM

Since the weekend, I've been asking myself the same question -- "What Are They Selling?" -- that's posed by the headline over Rita Chang's article about new ads touting "Droid" -- clearly shorthand for Google's Android operating system.

What we mostly glean from the spots are the alleged deficits of "iDon't" -- a clear (to the digerati, if not the average consumer) put-down of the iPhone. But it would appear that a goodly number of wireless consumers are unfazed by such charges as "iDon't have a real keyboard" because Apple posted its second-highest quarterly revenue results ever yesterday and, as the blurb for an RSS feed of Brian Caulfield's story in Forbes puts it, "the iPhone continues to stomp like Godzilla all over the recession" (see story below).

The commercial ends with "Everything iDon't ... Droid does. November." The campaign is from Verizon Wireless, Chang reports, essentially putting the kibosh on rumors that Apple would break its exclusivity with AT&T and take its iPhone to Verizon, among other carriers.

"A lot of this is inside baseball, and seems to target people with particular pain points with the iPhone," says Rene Ritchie, editor of The iPhone blog. But Andrei Jezierski, partner at marketing consultancy i2Partners, thinks the attack is smart. "Anytime you bash the iPhone, it's a great way to get attention," he says.

Read the whole story at Ad Age »