The Bizarre Reason HTC Sets Its Phones to the Same Time in All Its Ads
You probably know that in ads for watches, and in jewelry store displays, the hands on the clockface will generally be set to eight minutes past 10 o'clock so that they form a smiling face, just like in this ad for Citizen's Eco-Drive.
In the digital age, however, most people read the time from digital clocks that represent the hours and minutes as numbers, such as 10:08 a.m. (Some people worry that young people are growing up unable to tell the time from an old-fashioned analog clock.)
Smartphone maker HTC is keeping the tradition alive, however, in an amusing and irrelevant way: Almost all the phones it advertises are set to 10:08 a.m. or p.m. even though they have digital faces that in no way create a smiling face.
On its web site today, six of nine phones were set to 10:08. Two did not display a clock. Only the Evo 3D wasn't shown at mid-morning. Its clock is set to 4:56, presumably because 4-5-6 has a nice order to it but isn't as obvious or distracting as 1:23.
Credit for noticing this goes to comedian Dave Gorman, who did a whole section on the insanity of phone advertising at his Edinburgh Fringe show, Dave Gorman's Powerpoint Presentation.
Here are a few more HTC product shots, in which the digital clock has wiped the analog smile off its face:
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