This commercial is a bait and switch, and as is common with ads by Crispin Porter & Bogusky, they rely on subtle psychological ploys to effectively influence yo

This commercial is a bait and switch, and as is common with ads by Crispin Porter & Bogusky, they rely on subtle psychological ploys to effectively influence your thinking. The ad grabs your attention by highlighting the various ways in which society has become addicted to constantly checking information that resides in mobile devices. Several of the scenes deliberately emphasize activities in which another party is left deprived by someone using a phone. The most striking image to me was a father playing see-saw with his daughter, but we also have a game of catch, a neglected wife showing off lingerie, a neglected girlfriend during dinner. The scenes, and their inherent problems, are readily accessible and, importantly, relatable to our every day experiences. Lots of girlfriends in the house are nodding. So now it has seduced you into agreeing with its premise, and you kind of wonder how the commercial proposes to fix it. Cell phones are bad. And then, at the very end, they propose a solution! Yes! We have been waiting for it. The tagline: "It's time for our phones to save us from our phones. New Windows Phone 7. Designed to get you in, and out, and back to life." YES! Wait, or is it a solution? If we go back to the original montage building up to the release, the solution, note that what is being highlighted is the TACT of using a phone in particular situations, NOT, as the end implies, some kind of difficult to navigate software that makes information too lengthy a process to access. Have you ever checked email during dinner with a girlfriend on an iPhone or Android? How long does it take to glance at the new messages? 5 seconds? 7 tops? Guess what, she still disapproves. Same with the bedroom situation. If you think about it, the commercial, the first time you see it, seduces you into agreeing with the premise not that the phone takes too long to use, but that it doesn't belong in a bedroom! That it shouldn't be whipped out during a game of catch! In short, the commercial highlights a common problem that it fails to solve. It presents the solution in a grammar that almost solves the problem, but then if you think about it more deeply, utterly fails to solve that problem. Put another way, if Windows Phone 7 does solve the time access problem, the commercial utterly fails to provide any evidence that it succeeds in doing so, because it highlights something else. By not really featuring the product in any substantive way, the ad agency is showing that it can't figure out how to differentiate the product.