I was just on Twitter and I saw an ad for the new iPhone 15. It said, quite politely, that the iPhone 15 can take photos of 4x more resolution. Compared to what? Well, it had an image of an iPhone 12 and an image of an iPhone 15. “Oh, that’s so nice”, I thought, “but why is it comparing those two phones?”
It dawned on me that the ad is not random, it’s customized. It’s customized to my phone. So if I were on an iPhone 14 Pro, I might see a different ad. Except, here’s a problem – I am not on an iPhone 12. I’m on an iPhone 12 Pro. It doesn’t make a difference. The 12 and the 12 Pro both sport a 12 Mega Pixel main camera setup. The Pro simply adds a nice fish-eye lens, which is very, very useful to me.
What does make a difference is how the ad was crafted. It’s likely iOS is only sending a generic device signature of an iPhone 12 to the Twitter app, which is then passing it on to the Apple advertising vendor and I’m being shown that customized ad accordingly. The sad thing is that it’s just as likely that the exact device information of my phone is being handed to the app and the ad vendor is instead choosing to show me an ad to upgrade from an iPhone 12 to an iPhone 15 instead of an iPhone 12 Pro to an iPhone 15 non-Pro. After all, who wants to lose a camera in an “upgrade”? Apple does a great job of pushing the non-Pro phones every year as budget alternatives to the Pro models. So it’s no surprise they’d want someone using as “old” a phone as an iPhone 12 (Pro) to upgrade to the latest. But it’s an interesting marketing strategy to try to sell me on a non-Pro phone, if it is that.
I dunno which version of this is true. Interesting ad though.