The redoubtable Mr Rafe Blandford over at All About Symbian just published news that Nokia has begun to place full page newspaper advertisements promoting the company’s Ovi Store.
This is brilliant, brilliant news. It’s excellent for developers (particularly AP News, Evening Standard and Reuters who, as Rafe points out, are mentioned by name). It’s excellent for consumers. It’s excellent for Nokia.
It’s painful how ridiculously obvious this move has been for Nokia. Goodness knows why it took them so long. Well, I could hazard a few guesses, but I suspect the correct viewpoint here is to applaud them for turning up.
Provided they keep up with a sustained mainstream media approach, I think they’ll start to see both from consumer and developer attention begin to slowly shift in their favour.
So Nokia’s at it, now.
What about RIM? What about Sony, Samsung, Vodafone and the others?
Agreed! There is Iphone devlopment going on for quiet sometime now and they are far younger then Nokia and finally Nokia is thinking of this!
Now they need to figure out how to get the carriers to allow them to do this in the US like Apple is allowed to…
Do you mean carrier billing?
No, Ewan. ADVERTISING!
The reason the US market is dominated by the iPhone is they are the only manufacturers without the embargo on self marketing their devices. The carriers do all of the ads themselves, and they usually feature one of the carrier services with the device merely as a vehicle to get to those services more than the device features. Verizon broke the mold with the Droid campain, though those were carrier produced spots.
In the US, there are no device print ads not made by and pushing a carrier. This is by design. They control the device advertising market, and anyone who challenges that will incur high costs and zero subsidies for featurephones or converged devices. So I've never seen a Nokia ad in my life except on YouTube or online.
That is pretty shocking!
Nokia makes plenty of print and video ads. Its just the US carriers don't allow them or anyone else to use them here. They control which devices we can access, which get ads, and how the devices get protrayed.
So don't blame Nokia. Its the carriers. Apple got the first and only exception to this rule, so it has the biggest subsidy from a carrier in the US at $499 per device, the exclusive right to make its own TV and print ads, the first App Store with carrier billing, even though Nokia tried with Download years earlier but was seen as a threat, and freedom to make guest appearances on TV shows and news programs demonstrating the devices.