Well, I can say that the Droid Explosion is more likely due to the fact that the Verizon Ad actually put a spotlight on the Droid as being the competitor of the iPhone.
I mean, I never would have seriously looked at the Motorola Droid or the HTC Phones or even the Google Phone for the simple fact that the original HTC and Google Phone ads made the case for the phone, but not necessarily what the phone did.
The T-mobile Google Phone add just made it look like you can personalize it to taste, but not much else. The HTC ad focused more on that what you want is a phone that gets YOU.
The Verizon Droid commercial hits the spot on the market it truly wants to target... iPhone/iPod users. It hit me for that very reason, it pointed at the "iDon't" which nagged me about the iPhone and iPod. And originally, I thought it was a commercial for the iPod competitor. No mention of Motorola until I looked at the website it prompted.
When people started looking at what the Droid was, by Motorola's prompting and also seeing reviews about it that gave MORE information than what the Verizon site gave... That is what started getting people into thinking, "WTH, why should I go to AT&T and get an iPhone when this thing is coming out?"
What Verizon and Motorola did with their Ad was make it much more viral than Google or HTC. Both Google and HTC's ads did not prompt me to be curious about it, the ads, in my opinion, did not prompt me to look at it closer because it was 'just another smart phone attempt', almost a fad. When you look at some of the Smartphones in the past, Treo and some of the Windows Mobile type phones, they were not really 'great' and the one that had the most entertainment was the iPhone. The HTC and Google ads never touched on having apps, or it doing music, they just showed a phone that looked like you can customize.
Now if you look at the current commercials for Droid, a lot of them focus more on hyping the Droid name as being a robot that can do things and now showing off the Droid more than being a Viral Marketing campaign.
One thing I will have to say, the Droid Viral Marketing campaign probably is what really set fire to how things are, and again, I did not know HTC or the Google Phone was Android as well until AFTER going to the store and seeing them showcase the HTC Eris Droid phone as the cheaper, newer alternative Droid phone next to the Motorola Droid.
Now T-mobile and Sprint can capitalize on that fact as well as Google and HTC.
