With a new 15-second teaser, HTC & Robert Downey Jr. have officially kicked off their tandem #HTChange campaign to let tech junkies know that “Subversive Thinking Has Arrived.” After signing a two-year, $12 million contract agreement back towards the end of June, Downey Jr. will begin marketing HTC’s electronics lineup as himself instead of the blockbuster characters he portrays on the big screen.
The “Here’s to Change” global ad campaign is now underway with a short teaser trailer in which Downey Jr. cooly enters a boardroom full of deliberating bureaucrats to lay down some new ideas, assumably for the company’s general direction. He then nonchalantly unlocks and flips open his briefcase in one suave swoop, puts a piece of paper to his head, and states as if a lightbulb instantly illuminates above his cranium “Humungous tinfoil catamaran.”
End scene.
Ok, not the best TV spot I’ve seen RDJ in but no the worst either. The haphazard trifecta of words uttered by the star of the Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes franchises may appear to be a combination of utter jibberish, but “humungous tinfoil catamaran” are simply words that begin with the letters HTC. Get it? See for yourself below.
Crickets.
I’m hoping that the campaign morphs into something a little more amusing or utilizes RDJ’s unique, wide range and it likely will. According to Engadget, “the entire ‘Change’ campaign should cover the span of 24 to 36 months, during which it’ll be split into three phases.” Supposedly the first phase will be a number of 2-minute or less ads during which RDJ et al. throw out random three word combinations of the same pattern in the teaser in hopes of evoking some kind of word-of-mouth interest. As for the rest, “There’s no word on the timeframe for each phase just yet due to all sorts of variables.”
It’ll be interesting to see what direction this campaign takes. Signing Downey Jr. will likely pay off big for HTC as the Academy Award nominated actor is a global money maker with his The Avengers and Sherlock Homes franchises having grossed more than $5 billion and $1 billion worldwide, respectively.
After all, HTC is in desperate need for a pick-me-up as marketing blunders, delayed releases, and executive departures have steeply dropped the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer’s stock to a point where back in June it was trading at four-fifths of its value in 2011, when it trailed only Apple in smartphone sales in the U.S. Oh, and HTC actually stands for High Tech Computer.
