Apple using Tumblr to promote iPhone 5c, and other news for March 3, 2014
A few days ago a new Tumblr page called "isee5c" appeared which features Apple's first dedicated Tumblr ad campaign. Called "Every color has a story," the campaign shows five 15-second videos with color themes corresponding to the iPhone 5c and its colorful cases. The videos feature animated dots, which represent the dots of the iPhone 5c cases, moving to regional or period music. For example, one video features Portuguese music while another features French music.
When the Tumblr page first appeared, it seemed it might have been created by just an Apple fan. However, 9to5Mac did some digging into the matter and found that the complicated trail of who lies behind the Tumblr page leads back to Apple's ad agency:
While there is no absolute proof that Apple is behind these iPhone 5c videos, there is evidence that points to Apple likely being behind the new advertising campaign. First, some Tumblr users are reporting that the iPhone 5c colors Tumblr page is showing up as a Sponsored Post in their Dashboards. This means that the page's creator is paying Tumblr/Yahoo for the iPhone 5c page to show up as an advertisement. It is unlikely that a casual user would create such a paid campaign in the Apple style.
Connecting even more strongly to Apple is additional information from the webpage's source code. While the videos are completely hidden from being embedded by others, the source code informs us that the advertisements are actually being hosted on video-sharing network Vimeo.
These videos are hosted on a paid/pro account by the name of "MAL." The completely hidden MAL Vimeo account was created 5 days ago, and it lacks any additional information. The videos from the Tumblr do not even show up publicly on the channel page.
MAL is the name of Apple's advertising agency based in Los Angeles, California which works with Apple on most of its print, online, and television advertising strategies. The Acronym MAL is short for Media Arts Lab, and the group is a division of advertising behemoth TBWA.
In other news:
In a major legal victory, Apple has won the dismissal of a German patent troll lawsuit.
The OpenNI SDK that allowed developers to access 3D sensing hardware such as the Kinect has been shuttered after Apple bought Prime Sense.
Last week Tim Cook revealed "several billion" iMessages are sent each day along with 15 to 20 million FaceTime video calls.
