by Laura Rich

“Can a smartphone take on all comers without flinching? It can when it’s operating a cargo-bay-ful of apps…that you can run while running other apps,” taunts the announcer in “All Comers,” one of the latest ads for Droid, the mobile phone from Google. There are no people, only machines, and made-up technologies. It’s a teenage boy’s fantasy dream.

Verizon has spent $100 million on the creative and media to blanket the universe with such positioning since the fall, and they’re pretty inescapable on television, radio, Hulu, etc. Which is why it’s somewhat surprising that the target market has seemed to be so narrow.

I’m talking about the robots, the space void, the landscape free of humans, only machines and the cold, empty clicks and whirr of this barren universe. Which mainly appeal to the boys, who don’t want an easier-to-use, more instinctual device but a storyline that makes them a character in a futuristic, inter-galactic adventure. And who don’t want any girls around. (Watch the ads here.)

It seems like a step back. So much progress has been made in the last two decades to make technology friendlier, easier to use, more intuitive. And this has helped to integrate technology into our lives, create more communication, more community, more opportunities for individuals to be creative, start companies, help companies save money, be more accessible, etc. Making technology easier is not a bad thing.

But if you listen to the Droid ads, it kind of is. The ads are aggressively aimed away from women. They emphasize apps that “pinpoint any location to find the star in the sky above you… and identify planets you’re not on.” Really? This is an app we need?

Women don’t need pink, but they do want accessibility, sociability, utility. The Droid ads use technical language and insider taunts like the one about multi-tasking, which is aimed squarely at the iPhone’s inability to multi-task. (You can’t, for instance, run your Pandora app and then check your email. It’s one or the other. And it’s a pain. Thankfully, Apple has announced that the iPhone 4.0 OS, due out in the fall, will finally allow for multi-tasking.) Droids seem to want boys, not girls.

Anyway, lots of people agree that Droid is going heavy on the dudes.

But here’s another thought on why: it could be about more than just share of the immediate consumer market: As a friend reminded me, these devices—Droid, iPhone, Pre—live and die on their apps. Just as a computer without any applications is kind of pointless, too. So far, the iPhone leads the pack in apps, with more than 185,000 in its App Store. The Droid counts 38,000, but growing at a clip that’s expected to hit 100,000 by end of year. The Pre is not really even worth mentioning, with just 2,169.

So if the apps are the thing, it’s obvious why iPhone is king. But if the Droid really begins to capture the imagination of geeky boys—I mean, even those in their 20s and 30s, perhaps nerdy programmer types—well, who’s going to win the app race then? If the developers like the Droid, that’s where the apps will go. And if there are enough apps that make our lives easier, allow us to be more creative, efficient with our time, connect with others, etc.—no ad will be needed to convince more of us, no matter what gender, that the Droid is the better option. (Especially if the wireless service provider also prevents calls from dropping so frequently, too.)

More: Read the full breakdown on the anti-girls approach from this reader on Contexts.org, here’s a part of it:

0:04. The voice over’s question “Should a phone be pretty?” is
visually answered with an effect reminiscent of melting celluloid. The
rupture starts on top of the woman’s head, exploding her “pretty” face.

0:06. Women are beheld as dolls.

0:08. Images appear superimposed over images beneath a verbal
judgment. The beauty queen (fake) made out of plastic (fake) shown on a
television (fake) is definitively stamped “CLUELESS.”

0:10. The commercial erased its first woman by destroying the medium
of her representation (supposedly celluloid). The commercial again
destroys its second “woman” by destroying the medium of her
representation (a television).

0:10 – 0:13. Words across the screen: FAST, RACEHORSE, SCUD. Images:
Lightning, racing horse, ripping off duct tape, SCUD missile.
Combining these motifs into one single image, we see the SCUD missile
flying across the screen with the word RACEHORSE as though it were
written with lightning.

0:14. Droid applications: Reality Browser 2.1, Google Sky Map, Qik,
Mother TED, CardioTrainer, Where. While I doubt that these applications
were developed with the commercial’s themes in mind, their selections
reinforce the messages thus far enforced visually: reality (woman of
burnt celluloid, destroyed television), sky (SCUD missile), quick (FAST,
RACEHORSE), mother (a Freudian slip recognizing the infantile nature
of a power fantasy? ^_~), exercise (beef up for manliness stat +4), and
going places (which SCUD missiles, race horses, and THE MANLIEST OF
MANKIND’S MEN all do).

0:15. Word overlay: DOES. Men do things. Women are pretty and
useless.

Read the rest here.

–

This post originally appeared on LauraRich.com.

Its official.  Ladies, get your pink handbags out.  The new ad from PC World and Dell is officially the most patronising ever.  It starts with the line

My world is fashion.  I just have to colour co-ordinate everything.  Even my laptop.  That’s why I love the new Dell laptop.

Pass me the barf bag.  Please.  It just gets worse.  Should I get pink to match my shoes….  Must I go on?  I am sure you get the picture.

This is an example of 2 companies who have money to waste.  2 companies who have no idea of how to talk to women and most importantly, no idea of the role that technology plays in a women’s life.

I thought that Dell would have learnt from their latest Della ‘for women’ website which seems to have such bad press that they have renamed it.  This is disappointing as the Dell Inspiron mini 10 is a  fantastic piece of kit.   I also thought PC world had made some progress with their latest work.  But alas, it seems a group of middle aged balding in marketing (sorry but it has to be) decided that “women are the answer.”

Here’s the logic.

Women like shoes.

Women like pink.

So to make women like technology, we need to pink it up and dumb it down and make it match her shoes.

Do me a favour.  None of the professional women I know (which is where the biggest financial opportunity is) would be seen dead with a pink laptop.  For most women over the age of 12, pink is definitely not their world.

And even more offensive is not the colour, but the positioning.   The women I speak to love technology.  The creativity and human interaction it adds to their life.  Not because it matches their shoes.

On the positive side, it confirms how much technology brands need specialists such as Lady Geek to put an end to patronising ads like this.