I’m no huge fan of the Treo, for various reasons, but to push the company’s latest consumer-focused device, the Treo 680, Palm’s undertaken a fairly visible marketing campaign stressing all the things you can do with a Treo — and it’s not “keep track of your contacts” or anything so boring, the ads I’m seeing relatively frequently are all about things you can do on the internet on the device. I was reading the localized Austin version of The Onion on Saturday, and it had several of the ads inside (ads which I’ve reproduced here for your consideration and entertainment).
While the ads aren’t pushing anything that’s really all that new to anybody that pays much attention to this stuff, I think it’s pretty cool to see them advertising things like “Google a stranger” and checking your Gmail — the kind of thing an average internet user might be interested in, and the type of stuff many operators don’t advertise, focusing instead on their own content offerings. Even taking a half-page ad telling people they can send Onion headlines to their friends via text is nice — it’s nothing groundbreaking, but if it gets people using this stuff, it seems pretty good to me.
We can have all sorts of arguments about what devices/brand/operating system is the best, but it’s nice to see a device maker advertising the mobile internet like this. Of course, the implication that you can only do these things on a Treo is a little annoying, but I guess we’ve got to take the good with the bad when it comes to awareness building.
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