In a video titled, The Art of the Sizzle w/ David Bruce, HTC (TPE: 2498) satirically mocks the entire concept of the sizzle video that is designed to make you excited and intrigued by a simple video of a smartphone. There’s no doubt that HTC has participated in some of these sizzle videos, but the reality is that their competitors, namely Samsung, Nokia (now Microsoft), and Apple have really gotten the smartphone sizzle video down.
In fact, if you watch most smartphone introductions nowadays, you are almost guaranteed to watch some sort of a sizzle video in advance. Some companies like to focus on abstract angles and unique system features, while others simply try to make the phone look exciting by doing interesting motions and graphics alongside. A good example of this is Apple’s own iPhone 6 sizzle video. If that doesn’t give you a good idea of what’s in a smartphone sizzle video, then you can watch Samsung’s own Galaxy S5 introduction video.
The truth is that its actually quite hard to get a bunch of press and operators excited about a phone, especially since most phones nowadays are essentially the same phone with incremental upgrades and very little real innovation from one model to another. After all, it isn’t very profitable to be making major technological improvements from generation to generation. So, you need to focus on the exciting parts of the phone and accentuate them with the sizzle reel that gets people excited about your phone and gets their attention in preparation for the actual launch or actual unveiling in person or when people see them in stores.
Apple are the masters of these videos and I suspect that HTC is mostly mocking them with this video, however Samsung likes to do a lot of the same things that Apple does so it isn’t much of a stretch to consider Samsung part of this fad.
