In this silly spot for HTC smartphones with BoomSound, we see musicians playing their electric guitars, drums, etc., with their backs to the camera. There are people practicing, a band playing live on stage, and a band recording in the studio. This is cute and all, but I don't think the people who made this ad understand what they're talking about. You see, these musicians are playing electric instruments through amplifiers and singing into microphones: it doesn't matter if they're facing the audience or not, it only matters which way the speakers are facing. And since this is an ad for a cell phone with speakers facing forward rather than backwards, it seems to me that it might have worked better to say it's more important which way the speakers face. We could see a band playing live, facing forward towards the audience, but with their amp stacks all facing backwards, and the sound comes out all muted. So then the ad says the speakers need to face the right way, forward, for the best sound, and that's what this new HTC phone does. See what I mean?
But if they really want to stick with this musicians playing instruments facing the wrong way as their visual image, that's fine. But in that case, they really ought to be playing acoustic instruments, like horns, acoustic guitars, etc. And the easiest and most effective way I can think of to show that would be with a marching band: first they're facing and marching away, and the sound is muted; and then they're marching towards us, and the sound is much crisper and more well defined. See how this might work better than people who are playing electric instruments?
Oh, and the shot of the recording studio is a bit silly, as instruments generally have microphones recording them, especially when it's electric instruments and drums. In the old days, bands might have played live with a couple of room mics, but nowadays most everything gets its own mic track, or it goes direct. And it doesn't matter which way you face when you play in the studio, unless you play a horn and you have to face the microphone.
Now, to be fair, they do have one guy playing an acoustic guitar in an apartment while facing away toward a window, and that's a good example. But they cheat in most of these little scenarios, because they have people playing electric instruments without amplifiers, and you wouldn't be able to hear them like that anyway. And singers on stage using microphones? I mean, really. It doesn't matter which way you face when you're holding a microphone up to your mouth, so this part of the ad is not only misleading, it's embarrassing. And with the recording studio, they're cheating as well, because it's all about where you place the microphones, not which direction you're standing. And in a lot of recording studio situations, musicians are playing in what's known as an isolation booth, and you can barely even see them from the control room, so the recording engineer talks through a little microphone directly into their headphones. So again, how about using a marching band to illustrate this idea? That way they wouldn't have to cheat and look silly to people who play electric instruments and have been to recording studios. (Honesty is the best policy when making an advertising pitch; because if we see that the scenario doesn't make sense, it tends to undermine our trust in the product from the get-go.)
Here's the speaker spinning spot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty83kl3H6xc
You know, there was a band in the 1980s called "The Jesus and Mary Chain", and they were famous for facing away from the audience when they played live concerts. Critics used to write about how it was so anti-social and nihilistic, and that they did it for effect to seem ambivalent or something; but the truth is, they used a lot of feedback in their songs, and you can get feedback a lot easier on electric guitar if you face your amplifier's speakers. And their amps were stacked up behind them, as usual for a live band. And that's why they were facing backwards. But even so, the audience heard the sound just as well as if they were facing forward, because again, they were using electric instruments, and the sound comes out of the stationary amplifier when you use an electric instrument. Besides the fact that all the amps are generally miked up too at a live show and mixed through a live board and then pumped through the PA system. So even if the stage amp was turned around backwards, at a concert, the audience would still hear the sound blasting through the PA system.
