It’s Art, but do we like it?

We all have preferences in art, and one man’s Picasso is another man’s Tracy Emin, so it’s nice that BMW went out on a limb to make art the focus of their recent campaign for the Z4. For those too idle to click the link, it features the boy-racer-mobile driving around a large blank canvas depositing paints of different hues from its wheels to create an auto-matic masterpiece.

But while the TV ad is disappointingly coy in not revealing a full view of the masterpiece, the iPhone app (search for Z4 in iTunes) gives you the final result. After viewing a tantalizing clip of the live car in action, you get to drive the paint-wagon yourself, and the results are captured as a picture for you to save to your phone and… well whatever you want to do with that image. I’m quite pleased with mine – maybe all those handbrake turns are paying off.

The app is brimming with features, and very little seems to have been overlooked, from the various soundtrack choices (all ambient urban-cool thank you…) and a tutorial mode, to driving sensitivity adjustment and the little inspirational statements that appear on loading screens. Aside from the main art-driving conceit, there’s also a full car customizing section, which also allows you to save your personalized hotrod as an image and also reuse the car next time you play.

On the other hand, another auto release still riding high is the app for the Mercedes C63 AMG. While the car itself might been an animal on Top Gear, the app competition is quite different. A grey exterior leads to some uber-cheesy US-voiced video clips, some really dull photos, and the chance to listen to the unmuted roar of the C63′s engine. As the eco-driver of a Honda Jazz it’s hard to comment on the engine, but any car heard through speaker of an iPhone is certainly a little underwhelming – the engine rev is not dissimilar to the lion from my daughter’s favourite AudioZoo. The dealer locator works well – especially as I’m constantly amazed they bothered to bring StreetView all the way out to Watford. When iPhone 3.0 is released in the summer we’ll be able to embed the Google Maps inside the app rather than having to click out, which curtails the experience somewhat.

What we’re really seeing here is two different approaches to iPhone – BMW have provided a truly integrated approach to the rest of the creative, and done a great job technically, while the Merc effort is much more of an exercise in box-ticking, and probably a cheap one at that.

The funny thing is that both apps have been very successful in terms of number of downloads: the Z4 broke the top 10 chart of free apps, and the Mercedes is still in the top 20 Lifestyle apps; and this really shows how the use of apps is similar to any other advertising endeavour. Class may win you awards and tip the top end of consumers into being your fanboys, but for a large swathe of the market, it’s still the iPhone medium, not the message, that counts.

This article was first published in Revolution, Apr 01 2009.