Sprint refreshes image in new ad that features Palm Pre, Twitter

Long gone are the monochromatic Sprint advertisements featuring CEO Dan Hesse riding around New York.

In a move to give the company a little more of the, you know, forward movement that their name indicates, Sprint has replaced Hesse with an blitzkrieg of infographics and statistics in an attempt to show (my guess) that they can handle the complicated information-driven mobile world we now live in.

Oh, and you know, a brief cameo by the Palm Pre smartphone.

Here's the ad spot, via the Wall Street Journal (the irony that a Verizon/BlackBerry commercial played as pre-roll was not lost on me):

Great line: "233,000 people just Twittered on Twitter. 26% of you viewing this have no idea what that means." Precisely the demographic for the Pre, no?

(By the way, this statistical approach is not new: it was first revealed with Sprint's "Plug Into Now" widget in Dec. 2008, which has since been updated to feature the Pre.)

The ad shows the right kind of thinking, although I find it a bit overwhelming -- which I imagine is the point. Still, it doesn't make me want to buy into Sprint, and in some ways makes me want to avoid it for a simpler solution. What do you think? [via]