Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Not really what you want to do while you’re driving, man. It’s crazy how not that long ago this was, that was the killer feature. But even more important than other features was the marketing and the muscle that Verizon put behind this. They licensed the droid name from Lucasfilm. That’s right. I think Lucasfilm was mentioned at the bottom in the credits of every commercial. Yes, every commercial. They did these series of commercials that we’ve been referencing. Man, if you lived in the US and you are older than like 12 at this time, this is burned in your memory. It was so great. The first 80% of the ad, 90% of the ad was a Apple style ad knockoff with the like bright, happy, upbeat music and the white background. It had the fading apple style text and it said, I don’t multitask, I don’t have a removable battery, et cetera, et cetera. Then the very last five seconds of the ad, there was like a hard cut and like static noise and it was black and it was edgy and then it said Droid does. It was so good, the CMO of Verizon. Verizon did all of this, said that the campaign was designed to quote ‘wake up the market’ and boy did it ever. That original droid, I think it sold a quarter million units the first weekend it was on sale and then it sold a million units faster than the original iPhone had. Like there was just so much pent up demand for a real smartphone on the Verizon network. Plus all this has turn by turn navigation is, but even to put aside whether it was better or not, it just was a real smartphone on Verizon, Time Magazine named the Droid its product of the year for 2009.…

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