Hey guys, it’s the future! Motorola uses the image above to announce their new RAZR2 phone, partying like it’s cybergoth circa 1999 and brandishing a phone that looks it doubles as a light saber dildo. There’s a kind of sadness to this campaign, an aching desperation to make you feel the cutting edge of what’s basically just another souped-up fliphone, aged forever by the likes of OpenMoko and the iPhone.
Apparently, in Motorola’s perfect future, ladies will have disproportionate mutant man-hands. Or maybe it’s just an old trick for making cell phones in pictures appear more sleek and thin. In the future, the clothes get shinier, the cheap tactics stay the same.
November 5th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Yes, these ads have been plaguing the bus stops of Hollywood for much too long already. Even more pathetic is the one with the muscle-bound douchebag actually wielding the RazR like a tiinly leeedle sword. Amazing.
November 5th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
they’re all over the subways & bus stops up here in toronto too.
they’re giving off the vibe of trying way too hard, which is just sad.
November 5th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
They were all up about Manchester this summer….. personally I hate the bloody phones. As for the big hands syndrome, I had never spotted that before.
November 5th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
(Can’t seem to be able to locate that lost image.)
November 5th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
The Razr is one of those phones that when I see people with them I want to kick them. I hate those stupid things and I hate the ads too.
November 5th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
They used to look good, now they look common (and with bad specs).
November 5th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
The Razr is one of those phones that when I see people with them I want to kick them. I hate those stupid things and I hate the ads too.
Whoa, slow down - mine came with the contract! Hey, a free phone is a good phone in my book.
November 5th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
@ E-black: Yeah, cool the razr hate - it’s one of the few featureful phones you can get for really cheap! I overheard someone at barcamp this weekend saying that 60% of people visiting his company’s mobile site were using a razr v3. (That said, i spent a lot of time trying to avoid the razr and find a phone with an equivalent featureset and price point because the razr is ugly and Moto’s menus aren’t so great. Nokia provides)
November 6th, 2007 at 4:25 am
Corporate America has appropriated everything we know und love. My hate will not allow me to type anything beyond that’ll be legible.
November 6th, 2007 at 11:27 am
I was a loyal Nokia fanboy until the V3 arrived, and at the same time my 6180 started crashing like it was Windows 95′. For no added cost I moved to the v3, which by any standards is a crap phone these days, but at least it hardly ever dies on me, and has been with me for a couple of years now.
(I was gonna move to the shiny new n95, but my provider would only let me upgrade if I took their data package along with it, a useless proposition if I ever heard one for a phone with good wifi).
I think Moto probably figured that most people got the v3 because they labeled it RAZR (as in, cutting edge) and because it looked pretty shiny and somewhat like a Star Trek communicator. Style over substance people, isn’t that what cyberpunk is all about? ;)
November 8th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Comparing the bland and uninteresting Italian cellphone ads, Razr are actually stilish (and I always was a sucker for cosplay-looking characters).
However, the advertising trickery is inane… while Apple simply got a bigger hand-model for their close up shots, Motorola digitally upped the size of the hands: comparing them to the model face blatantly shows the lack of proportions and the ad loses quite a lot of appeal (how can you be stilish and slick with hands like that?).
Last year Motorola got in trouble with the Dolce & Gabbana Razr ads (apparently the ad visual “glamourised knifeplay”)… judging by the ad for razr 2 they didn’t learn the lesson.
November 9th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
@ Lucylle: “how can you be stilish and slick with hands like that?” I know! Exactly. Her hand is as large as half her arm. It’s just grotesque. What art director approved that?
The knifeplay ad was cute, I had not seen it before. Except for the part where the guy is looking at Yahoo’s homepage on his phone - that part took away some of the futuristic elements.
March 31st, 2008 at 2:03 am
[...] 31 mars 2008 | Av Cosmo7 | Publicerad i Andra språk, Engelska, Photoshop Disasters, Webben Remember when Apple was dragged over hot coals for using a well-endowed hand model to make their iPod look smaller? Motorola throws caution to the wind and brazenly scales up their RAZR model’s mitts. (As if the image wasn’t video-card-packaging bad anyway.) Much respect to Nadya at Coilhouse. [...]