Mike Freeman

Recent news of HTC investing $300m for 51% majority share of the Beats brand by Dr Dre has come to my attention. This combines some of my biggest interests: technology, business, marketing and music!

HTC have announced that new phones will feautre the Beats speakers. A little twitch has started under my eye as I imagine the following: ‘a youngster sitting at the back of the bus or behind me on the train blasting out the latest in ghetto grime funk-dub on there new HTC phone with Beats speakers while fellow passengers writhe in agony, gripping their offended earholes and praying to God for His Wrath’.

A solution for this could be to pre pack all new HTC with personal Beats headphones (the ones with a noise cancelling feature) instead of integrating Beats speakers into the phone. But having tested a pair of the headphones myself, I know that they are so powerful that even on a low loudness setting the reverberations could instantly mush your brain into slush (Still, this would make listening to the likes of Cher Lloyd more pleasurable).

I urge HTC to take note and act fast. The lucritive market that is “teens with mobiles” may bring you higher sales revenue and profit in the short term, but you will surely tear down society in the long run with epic speaker battles, gang-land style speaker-ings and you’ll certainly offend the green party with noise pollution.

Interesting article here from Andy Owen reminding marketers, in particular copywriters, of some advertising fundamentals of selling and that advertising must “sell more than tell”.

In my opinion, Owen neglects the artistic importance of advertising. In quoting John E Kennedy: “An ad should not be charming, amusing or even necessarily pleasing to the eye - a good ad should be a rational, unadorned instrument of selling” I would disagree. Advertising helps differentiate a company, product or service from competitors. And when there isn’t much difference between them, then the brand must be unique and strong. If a more artistic approah can be successfully incorporated into an ad to reinforce an original brand without jeopardising the underlying message then I say BANG ON!

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this year, Steve Jobs announced the new operating system iOS5 for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

All the interesting new features can be found here. My particular favourite is the Notification Centre - an idea stolen from Google’s Android OS which has had this feature since it’s first version in 2008.

The intesting thing is that Apple have enhanced the uses of the existing Google swipe-down notification bar. iOS5 allows it’s user to see notifications on the screen-lock page and to access any notification immediately from the screen-lock page by swiping across it.

Google has had this technology since the first phone to feature Android in 2008 (the HTC Dream or G1) but failed to be the first to implement such enhancements.

Apple is the master of manipulating existing ideas into their own, new, cool idea!

I am looking forward to Androids new Ice Cream Sandwich OS due to release in Q4 2011 to see whether Google has anything up it’s sleeve…