Moto X News: Ad Budget Comes in at $500 Million, How Does This Compare to Other Ad Budgets?

The Moto X is prepared to make quite the impact on the mobile phone market when it becomes available in the coming weeks to major service providers such as AT&T (who get the device first), Sprint, and Verizon. Motorola is doing everything they can to make the phone a success, setting aside a huge chunk of money to get the word out about the phone.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting (via Bloomberg Businessweek) that Motorola is willing to spend $500 million on advertising for their latest device. While that is a huge number to contemplate, it is actually far less than some of the company's competitors spend on promoting their devices. Business Insider has Apple spending $1 billion on advertising in 2012, and Samsung is outspending them all by spending $4 billion in advertising the same year. In addition, Samsung spend an addition $5.3 billion in "sales promotion" which equates to commissions and in-store displays, training, and other expenses. All in All, Samsung spent roughly the same amount of money as the Gross Domestic Product of Fiji just in advertising, and the GDP of Guinea in these "sales promotion."

While Motorola may not be spending billions on advertising the Moto X and other products, CEO Dennis Woodside has promised to Bloomberg Businessweek that Motorola "has teams ready to train in-store staff on the features of the phone, particularly the new Touchless Control features."

The Moto X is another attempt by outsiders to chip away at the dominance of Apple's iPhone on the high end smartphone market. While the smartphone may not have the best specs available on the market, it is the customization options that come with the phone that has people interested in the device. Anyone wishing to buy the phone can customize the phone in ways that other smartphones simply cannot achieve, and Motorola has promised to ship out custom Moto X phones in four days, so long as it is in the United States.

Motorola is getting ready to drop huge amounts of money to promote the Moto X, but they may have to spend more to contend with the money that Apple and Samsung are willing to drop on advertising to get casual consumers to go out and build their own Moto X. Because of the unspectacular specs of the device, the success of the phone will come from getting regular people to get into the customizable aspect of the phone and motivate people to go online and order their own Moto X.