Apple’s iPhone marketing and promotion may go down in history as text book classic-- Best. Campaign. Ever.

What other pre-launch marketing campaign even comes close? Windows ‘95? Nope. Ford’s Mustang? Nope. Original Mac? Nope. And ditto for about anything else you can think of short of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.

I’ve been a public relations, media, advertising, and promotions professional for nearly 20 years and have never witnessed anything like Apple’s iPhone campaign. You are witnessing history in the making.

What we know of the iPhone started with a Macworld keynote presentation back in January 2007. Until recently, Apple published a mere handful of press releases, a single TV commercial, and a few online videos and specifications.

More recently, Apple’s iPhone details have slowly become available in an orchestrated manner, along with more comprehensive videos, and a superb series of TV commercials; classy and effective.

Everyone is talking about the iPhone, yet few have even seen it-- fewer have held it, myself included, though the promise of five minutes was closer to three and felt like 30 seconds.

Is it all hype? No. Most hands-on reviews are highly positive and favorable. Detractors are few and far between and mostly representative of the typical anti-Apple, anti-Jobs variety, for whom Christ’s return to earth, and a walk down the strip in Las Vegas would be met with criticism.

Enter yet another golden age for Apple and once boy-wonder, Steve Jobs. The iPhone era is here. Just as the Mac made computing totally different than the past, and the iPod made listening to music totally different than the past, the iPhone, and future generations, will change how we communicate.

Look at these headlines and links from the past week.

iPlayboy
It didn’t take long for Hugh Hefner’s heavenly bodies to make it to POV and the iPhone.

Bloomberg
In a masterful turnaround, Bloomberg calls the iPhone the most successful marketing effort ever. They agree with me. We’re both cool.

Wait. There’s more.

My list of what everyone is saying about the iPhone and why is sooooooo long that I had to move it off the Forums. Click Here for the rest of the story and all the links you can eat.

I have to agree.  The iPhone is a marketing masterpiece.  Apple hasn’t really done much to get the word out on this one, and yet it is the most anticipated piece of tech that I have ever seen.  Now if they would just get it on another network.  Also most of the detractors it seems, have not even touched one, nothing like knokcing something without even trying it.

BunsenHoneydew - 29 June 2007 01:49 PM

Ah I see you have the machine that goes PING!

Is that you, Chutem?

I agree it’s great marketing, but it sure helps to have a great product!

Regarding the naysayers.........

Here we go again. The intensely negative ‘reviews’ of the iPhone are a repeat of the intensely negative reviews of the 1st gen. iPod.

From the same pundits who just can’t help themselves when it comes to Apple.

The rest of us thinking humans will remember that 5 GB iPod. And when we think of what it has become in a few short years, we’ll embrace the iPhone with intense excitement.

But you always have to remember that there will always be naysayers. Always.

Many which are legitimate, and many which aren’t. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what product you’re trying to sell.

People will always compare your product to all the others, no matter how apt or relevant you think the argument is. That’s the definition of opinion and point of view.

You know that the competition has spent a lot of time and energy getting ready to fight this phenomenon, and that says a great deal about fear. If someone releases a new phone that your company cannot sell (in this case because of an exclusive five-year deal with AT&T;), it is garbage. But think of it from the other side. If you were in AT&T;’s shoes, the invention of the wheel would pale in comparison. You want masterful, consider what Apple did with regard to the network capabilities.

I was #532 in line to enter an Apple Store (yeah, I could have gone to the AT&T;store, but it would not have been the same), and that was 20 minutes before the store opened at 6 PM. I finally held one and touched it and tried it out. My RAZR looks like junk. My MP3 capability was hamstrung because it had to be an MP3 created by Windows Media Player 10 (not made for the Mac). The data took minutes to use, but AT&T;has unlimited data use. Jobs announced battery life in January, but a week and a half ago the company said it would ship with a better battery. The screen was to be plastic, but the company announce, along with the new battery (free replacement, by the way) that it was using optical glass.

Anyone know the story of the Rumble in the Jungle: Ali vs. Foreman. Anyone remember the rope-a-dope? Yeah, welcome to The Congo, folks. Apple’s marketing may have been brilliant, but its legendary secrecy will be paying dividends for months as journalists and “journalists” look for new crow recipies.

cwtnospam - 29 June 2007 04:01 PM

BunsenHoneydew - 29 June 2007 01:49 PM

Ah I see you have the machine that goes PING!

Is that you, Chutem?

I agree it’s great marketing, but it sure helps to have a great product!

Yep its me I haven’t been on the hints forums for a while, I use it for troubleshooting and such as it is the best for that.  I think the iPhone is a great product and being marketed about a perfectly as possible.  I just wish they had it on another carrier is all.  I will not switch to ATT for it, I probably would buy it if it were on Verizon.  I realize that service by some companies is better in certain cities, but where I am nothing can compete with Verizon.  It would be a shame to have such a great product but not be able to use it because you cant get signal. Just my $.02.

I went back to my local Apple Store today to try out the keyboard, and I only had to wait five minutes or so to try one. Just for giggles, I typed in a 27-character (including periods) web address at full speed with one error. Anyone who says the keyboard can’t compete with Blackberry has not tried both. Incidentally, the same web address usually triggers at least two errors on my computer keyboard.

How well can you double thumb type on the onscreen keyboard?

I’ve got a friend who might want to double thumb type if he gets an iPhone.

victor_c26 - 04 July 2007 02:28 AM

How well can you can you double thumb type on the onscreen keyboard?

It’s actually quite easy to double thumb-- as good or better than a Blackberry. There’s some secret key stroke combinations, too. One thing I found was that I could increase typing speed by just typing fast and not worrying much about spelling as the iPhone does a good job of recognizing spelling errors and making changes on the fly.

All the talk about not having a tactile keyboard causing typing problems is nonsense and most reviewers say the same thing.

Alexis Kayhill - 04 July 2007 02:43 AM

All the talk about not having a tactile keyboard causing typing problems is nonsense and most reviewers say the same thing.

This is dead on; however, the lack of a realistic keyboard sound really leaves me flat. Also, I want the screen to flash in time with the proper rotary clicks for each button pressed when dialing. There just is not enough old-fashioned feedback of these types.

iphone nano is coming check this new patent that Apple has filed today…

shows a simplified input pad with numbers on it, and it could conceivably be a simple follow-on to the iPhone. The touchpad “displays graphical elements to indicate input areas of the touchpad,” and as you can see, it displays those symbols in a circular arrangement....

Here is the link : http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u;=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1;="20070152983".PGNR.&OS=DN/20070152983&RS=DN/20070152983

The friend I was talking about just got his iPhone delivered to his house.

It works really well I must say. I still had some doubts about its usability.

I tried double thumbing right away and made some mistakes. Not huge mistakes, just some keys that just caught the edge of my thumb.

Browsing through Safari is a breeze too. But it did crash on me once (It looks like it just closes on you for no reason by itself).

Didn’t get to use the iPod interface or the phone interface yet, all of this happened while carpooling to work. Heh.

I enjoy Bambi’s writing and welcome her back.

Jack and I just finished up a month of biking through parts of Europe. We’d stop at internet cafes to catch up on email. We ran into plenty of Mac users and many asked about the iPhone. I guess it doesn’t show up there until later this year, but people there pay attention to Apple’s news and the iPhone is high on the shopping list. Everyone had cell phones wherever we went.