The struggling cellphone/PDA maker Palm has a new ad campaign for this holiday season: “Santa’s Gone Centro“:
Notice how Santa’s changed:
- Close cropped facial hair
- Skinny
- Aviator sunglasses
- Knows how to DJ
- Walks around town with an unconventional pet
- Pasty white complexion (okay, I guess that part hasn’t really changed)
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, Santa’s gone hipster. Looks like Palm didn’t get the message that Hipsterism is dead.
Still, I do give credit to Palm in that a Centro is a fine phone choice for a hipster who cares about irony in his choice of gadgets. If a hipster’s goal is to ironically appreciate things that mainstream society finds little worth in (the aforementioned Thundercats t-shirts from the thrift store, trucker hats, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer), then s/he would do well with a Centro. It runs on the hopelessly dated Palm OS platform, it lacks Wi-Fi, and worst of all, the touch screen requires a stylus to navigate. Remember the stylus? Didn’t think so.
So kudos to Palm for cornering the market that ironically appreciates mediocre smartphone hardware. But what I really want to know is, what kind of gifts does Hipster Santa (excuse me, “Claüs,” with an umlaut) give to the good little hipster boys and girls for Christmas?
Carousel image blatantly ripped off from Busted Tees. There’s a link. Merry X-Mas.
Who are the ad wizards that came up with this one?
I’m mulling over another commercial in the series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heSOtHw7oXc
Santa valet-parks a reindeer. And as a tip, he gives the parker a tiny dog. Not like a poodle. A comically tiny 2-inch tall dog. I’m not 100% sure why Santa does this. Why would Santa reward this guy by giving him a fictional species of dog? I guess it’s because it’s a tip. For tips, you just give a little bit of money. So Santa gives him a tiny dog. I think?
It has something to do with Sprint bring, for multiple years, the worst company for customer satisfaction in its industry.
They just want to piss off as many people as possible.
All the ads are up on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/user/santasgonecentro
I don’t think Santa himself has gone hipster, but Sprint. Santa is being used by Sprint in the same way the Thundercats logo is used by individual hipsters in regular society. Sprint is trying to look cool, so it’s messing with Santa’s image. It doesn’t care about what Santa REALLY represents, so it uses his image in its ads to seem like it has a sense of what people want.
Don’t blame Santa for Sprint’s being out-of-touch. Shame on you. I hope you get lots of coal.
I hated those ads so much, when I first saw it I said to myself, “I don’t know what they’re advertising, but I will find out so I can be sure not to buy it”