This story is quite amazing in its own right. Who would have thought one company would benefit from the marketing ad campaign of another? This is exactly what happened in the case of T-Mobile/HTC and the iFog Apple app. Let’s dig in a little deeper what this story was all about.
Let’s talk about T-Mobile’s side of the story first . T-Mobile’s HTC has launched its My Touch 3G mobile phone also known as Android phone. It is a smartphone with a lot of nice features such as 3G, 3.2MP camera, Wi-Fi, HSDPA, Bluetooth connectivity, touch screen and many more. Plus, it is running Googles Android O.S. You can visit ready2beat for specification data and reviews on this smartphone.
What is iFog?
Now, let’s find out more about iFog. iFog is created by an Apple app developer from Israel, ApParty (later named LibraFestival). This application creates a “fog effect” on your iPhone display after blowing on the iPhone’s microphone. When the fog effect sets in, users can write messages on their iPhone using their fingers. It could also be the other way around, that is writing on your iPhone screen first before blowing the microphone to create the fog. This way, “secret” messages can be written.
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The result?
T-Mobile ran a marketing video Ad campaign featuring their new My Touch 3G smartphone featuring Dana Carvey and other notable people. One of the features shown in the video was very similar with the iFog apple apps (see the last part of the video).
The result? Several iPhone users who witnessed the entertaining and cool video advertisement rushed to itunes store and purchased iFog. Obviously, this resulted to an increased in the sales of iFog application. BTW, this apple app. sell for $0.99 and around 200,000 subscribers have already downloaded it from itunes even before this “accidental” sales happened. Techcrunch provided the sales figure of iFog as well as the complete story of this “comic” video campaign.
And now, see the T-Mobile ad video for its My Touch 3G. For us, we will call it: The iFog sale booster video.
Perhaps, iFog should give a “thank you” remark or an incentive to T-mobile associates for shooting their sales up. We are not sure either, if T-Mobile did its homework about iFog’s functionalities (apparently they didn’t). It’s alright, mistakes do happen but this time it was a mistake where someone benefited a lot. Congratulations iFog developers and good job T-Mobile! (images courtesy of Macnn)
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Tags: Android phone, ApParty developer, apple apps, HTC, iFog, iPhone app, itunes store, LibraFestival, My Touch 3G comic video, T-Mobile, T-Mobile hilarious video ad for iFog
This is cool but I don’t think all that surprising. The fact that in watching a commercial produced by one brand, consumers would think to Another brand that they know and trust speaks volume as to Apple’s brand equity. Much harder to quantify than sales figures, etc. But of undeniable value in the case of a company like Apple. John Tantillo has done several pieces on his marketing blog – http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv – dissecting just what Apple has done so Right.
(If you saw a commercial for a non-Kleenex brand of tissues, might you not be more likely to go out and buy tissues? And actually end up buying Kleenex brand rather than brand X?)