Nokia kicks off US advertising campaign with a Beta Test, takes on the iPhone
There is little doubt that Nokia has the deep pockets, ingenuity and cleverness to make an effective advertising campaign for the AT&T Lumia 900. The question is, when will “Operation Rolling Thunder” …
Context & Ripple Effects
This campaign is the latest move in a five-year pattern: Nokia ran an anti-Apple campaign back in October 2007 and told the New York Times in December of that year it was pushing to regain U.S. sales in spite of Apple and Google, so framing the Lumia 900 against the iPhone is a familiar playbook re-run with a new device.
What changed by April 2012 is the hardware and the carrier commitment: the Lumia 900 was tested on AT&T and Verizon's 4G LTE networks in December 2011, per carrier LTE trials, and is set for an April 8th AT&T release. Eight outlets picked up the campaign story on day one, and Nokia arrives at the launch fighting Apple on other fronts too — a Nokia-Motorola-RIM consortium has filed a competing nano-SIM proposal against Apple's, with Nokia saying it will withhold essential-patent licenses if Apple's standard wins at ETSI.
First-order effects
- AT&T gets an exclusive flagship backed by a heavyweight national ad push starting days before the April 8th launch, making the Lumia 900 its marquee smartphone counterweight to the iPhone.
- The campaign has to carry demand largely on its own: Angry Birds Space's absence from Windows Phone is a confirmed blow to Nokia's ecosystem pitch, removing one of mobile's biggest app draws from the phone the ads are selling.
Second-order effects
- Apple now faces Nokia on two simultaneous fronts — the retail/advertising front around the Lumia 900 and the standards front, where the nano-SIM dispute puts Nokia's patent portfolio behind Motorola and RIM's rival proposal.
- RIM gains an unlikely ally: Nokia's willingness to tie essential patents to the nano-SIM outcome strengthens the joint anti-Apple standards bloc RIM already joined, raising the cost to Apple of winning ETSI outright.
Third-order effects
- If the Lumia 900 launch validates the model, US smartphone competition settles into carrier-aligned campaigns where operators and manufacturers co-fund flagship pushes against Apple's ecosystem gravity — the same structure Nokia attempted, unsuccessfully, in 2007.
- A repeated gap between marketing scale and app-catalog depth would push Microsoft and Nokia toward paying or partnering for marquee titles, since the Angry Birds absence shows ads cannot substitute for the store shelf.
The trend: Handset makers outside Apple are buying back US relevance through carrier-exclusive flagships and mass advertising while contesting Apple simultaneously on standards like nano-SIM.