Pomegranate NS08 Phone a Hoax: Part of $300,000 Ad Campaign for Nova Scotia
By James Falconer on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 11:29 AM PST In Advertising, Rumors
So here I was this morning, reading the news checking my usual favorite blogs, when I came across another story about the Pomegranate NS08. You remember the device right? Looked kind of cool, it opened up into 3 distinct sections and offered some interesting ‘lifestyle’ features.
Having been suspicious of it just a tad, I wandered on over to the official Pomegranate site where I knew something was up. Upon exploring the site, I noticed the device offered a built in coffee brewer, a shaver, and a harmonica. ‘OK, what’s going on here?’ I thought… ‘This has to be a joke or some sort of wacky PR campaign!’
Looks like the latter was a correct assumption.
After some quick research it looks like the Pomegranate concept phone is part of a $300,000 ad campaign put together by the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. That’s right… Nova Scotia, that beautiful little province on the Atlantic coast of Canada. The campaign is part of the new Nova Scotian ‘Come to Life’ ad campaign, which hopes to build interest in the province through non-traditional means (you’re kidding!?).
‘Come to Life’ rep Stacey Jones-Oxner said in an email:
“We needed to find a unique way to get people focused on our province…Since there is so much buzz out there around the newest and latest smartphones, we thought this was a good device to use. This is especially true when you consider that the people who are interested in the latest technology are often people involved in business and tend to be key influencers.”
The website built for the make-believe device is now roughly a month old, and was built entirely by folks from Nova Scotia. The hosting is even setup in the province. To date, the site has received somewhere in the realm of 150,000/200,000 hits (no details on if the numbers are ‘hits’ or actual ‘unique visitors), which seems to be a surprisingly and stunningly low number for me. If I had spent $300,000 of my own coin on an ad campaign, you could bet I would want more eyeballs than that… And more importantly, I’d want 100% of them to know what is actually going on… I bet you half of the people that left the site still thought the device was for real!
At any rate, I simply thought this was uber-interesting, especially for a Saturday morning. You can go ahead and check out the official Pomegranate site here. Explore it long enough and you’ll eventually hit some promo materials for the province of Nova Scotia. Oh, and make sure to sound-off in the comments, would ya?
[Via: LA Times]
stupid ass holes tricked me
If this was set up to promote Nova Scotia, it certainly didn’t work for ME. The first I found out about it was HERE on your site! I found the dvice to be interesting, but I figured it was a fraud when it came to brewing COFFEE. At first I thought that you could program a remote machine to do the task with the phone, but when I saw a straw sticking out from the bottom of the device, I tought to myself, “That CAN’T be sanitary.” There is no way that it would pass health codes. It would be too hard to clean, and keep clean. The razor and the harmonica put the lid in the coffin for me. The Projector did not seem too feasable, but might be possible with technological advances. At no point did I see anything that had to do with Nova Scotia.
These guys seem to be bright people, but they are too bright by half. They forgot the POINT of the advertisement.
well when u think abt it itx never will b immpossible for that lame fake thing to come real
if it was real they would advertise nd stuff on tv nd see the videos proper nd u might learn how thats not possible
they had me untill i saw the coffe this is technologicly inpossible and is BULLSHIT
Sorry to all the haters of this campaign but I liked it
But that might be because of my marketing background.
Although I also must say that such a campaign can easily backfire and that there will always be lovers and haters.
Bummer if you had your hopes up for your very own coffee-brewing-legs-shaving-smartphone
how we can find or order pomegranate ns08
As Hugh says “…this ad was made by 1/2 bright ppl” ! i’m 1dering if their nova scotia promotion is still wrking!had these canadians wrkd on some odr idea, i’m sure dey wud get mor dan eyeballs and raked in some real $$$ and some new novascotians interstd in business!
u kno wt dey say abt canadians aftrall,aye