As much as we love luxury watches, the way they’re presented can be a bit pretentious. From viewing the ads for some brands, you would think that all lovers of fine timepieces spend their time lunching in expensive restaurants with fellow beautiful people or racing Italian sports cars on mysteriously deserted roads. That’s the snobbish image that Motorola lampoons in the new ad campaign for the new Moto 360 smartwatch.
The biggest challenge for makers of smartwatches is making their product stand out from the geeky-looking plastic pack. That’s what Motorola is trying to do with the Moto 360, a stylish timepiece priced at $249 and $299. The brand wants the Moto 360 to be seen as just a watch rather than a smartwatch.
That’s the purpose behind the current holiday ad campaign for the computerized watch. The ads parody the overly dignified way that luxury watches are often marketed, poking a bit of fun at an industry that sometimes takes itself too seriously.
The Moto 360 campaign features six videos designed for digital media including two 15-second spots especially for Instagram. Obviously, they’re aiming at a younger, hipper group than the older, richer target audience for luxury Swiss watches.
The campaign is called “A Watch for Our Times” and the spots reveal a cheeky sense of humor. The ad called “Craftsmanship” shows the camera panning over a well-dressed model. In “Style. Burritos” a man gets a notification that his food order is ready on his Moto 360. The spot called “Chad” opens with a classy shot of a concert pianist whose performance is interrupted by an X-rated text message.
The humor grabs your attention while the content sneakily shows off some of the things the Moto 360 can do that a luxury watch can’t, as well as how stylish the watch looks while doing them.
Back in September, Motorola CMO Adrienne Hayes explained the logic behind the amusing ad campaign to Ad Age. “We want to be more playful in our approach.” In the case of the ads for some ultra-expensive timepieces, it would be hard to be less playful, so this approach does set the company apart.
Hayes added that she intended to repurpose “the model that the traditional watch industry has used for, it seems like, centuries, and we’re taking a fun spoof and spin on that.”
This would seem to be the right move at the right time, since Motorola is setting the image for the Moto 360 just ahead of the launch of the Apple Watch in spring 2015. The market for wearable devices is expected to mushroom over the next couple of years and each new smartwatch will have to be unique in some way in order to attract a segment of that market.
With this clever and engaging ad campaign, the Moto 360 seems to be off to a good start.
