The latest Window’s phone ad “Come Together” broke this week and has us all talking. Packed with insults for each of the popular mobile phone loyalists, the ad is the third in a winning streak for Windows. Two other ads released in late March round out three of the top five performing ads of the year so far in this fiercely competitive category.

Interestingly there are many distinctly different approaches from the dominant players –each jockeying for top position and earning it on any given day.

Window Watching

With a relatively small portfolio of ads in market, Windows still employs three different approaches each tried by other mobile phone players at different times and each earning top quintile scores and

1.    A head to head competition of the Galaxy S3 vs Nokia Lumia 920 picture quality, convincing a current Samsung owner to switch to a Windows phone
2.    A continuation of their celebrity featured testimonies (most recently Grant Hill, previously Jessica Alba and Gwen Stefani.
3.    The parody of brand loyalists attacking each other with insults at a wedding

Samsung Means Business

Leading the race in terms of volume  – airing more than twice the ads as its closest competitors, Samsung has been focusing more on the business environment – demonstrating its differentiating features such as network security and multitasking through a continued story of the Unicorn Apocalypse– a shift from their 2012 photo and video feature focused ads.

Samsung has also infused its share of celebrities into their ads – most recently with Paul Rudd, Seth Rogan and Tim Burton which did best with the 21 – 35 demo and was a huge online success topping the YouTube’s Ad Leaderboard for February. Earlier celeb studded ad “Looking Smart” featuring Jermaine Paul and Blake Shelton remains the highest scoring mobile phone ad in the last 6 months. (Ace Score 635)

Apple Appeal

Apple iPhone has also used its share of celebrities – this year with just the one “Dream” ad featuring the Williams sisters. But recently the brand has remained focused entirely on their photo features, speaking of which…

What feature do you value most in your mobile device? Not the coolest or the thing you do most often throughout the day – but what do you need your phone to do better than any other phone out there? Among our inner office poll the most common complaint among variety of device users is call quality… oddly not one person said the quality of their photos was unsatisfactory. But only one ad in the last 6 months focuses on a feature related at all to sound quality and most advertisers in the space are keenly focused on differentiating their photo features.

For a change of pace, this latest Windows ad takes a humorous slant at all of the well known mud slinging between brand loyalists, earning high attention and likability scores, and while lower on the information than the other two ads in market, it certainly makes a strong statement about where Windows sees itself playing – squarely inside of the battle of the phones.

To watch the video, click here.