HTC IMEI Stickers: Oh For the Love Of…

I was watching an episode of Under The Dome a couple of months ago, and I saw something that made me groan:

See what it was? That big, ugly white sticker on the back of the HTC 8X. It’s a sticker designed to be removed by the customer – it has the IMEI number on it so customers can reference it if they need to call in for support. The 8X is a beautifully designed product – it’s has gorgeous soft-touch plastic that looks great (but sadly doesn’t wear well long-term) and HTC made it in bold, powerful colours. Beauty ruined by a sticker.

Seeing that big white sticker on the back is an insult to the designers at HTC who created the product. The prop-master should have removed it. The HTC or Microsoft person who supplied the phones for use on the show should have removed it. Anyone with half a brain, who cares about how products look on camera, should have removed it.

What makes this particularly galling is that it’s not the first time I’ve seen this – HTC has product placements in the past where an HTC phone is shown in a photo, and it has that IMEI sticker on the back. HTC cares so deeply about design, giving out seed phones with ugly stickers on the back is a big miss. Customers don’t know that’s a sticker – what they see is a phone with a weird white blob on the back.

Have you ever seen an Apple phone looking anything other than perfect in any sort of product shot?

Marketing side-bar: Microsoft paid for a lot of sponsorship opportunities in this show – it’s easily the most aggressive, and obvious, product sponsorship I’ve ever seen on a TV show. Microsoft’s fictional market share with the population who is trapped under an unbreakable dome is absolute: every phone in the show is a Windows Phone, every tablet and laptop is a Surface. It’s like the town that Steve Ballmer built! 🙂