Iconic watchmaker stars in playful new campaign from IWC Schaffhausen
IWC Schaffhausen is pleased to introduce the new ‘A SMART WATCH. AND A HALF’ campaign. Launching on YouTube, the three comedic shorts feature legendary IWC watchmaker, Kurt Klaus, paying an unlikely visit to a generic smartwatch store.
In conversation with a shop assistant, Klaus scrutinises the smartwatches, focusing on a different aspect in each bite-sized film. The relentlessness of updates, the brevity of battery power and the at-times baffling nature of user experience are all subtly ribbed. At the end of each spot, smartwatches are then wordlessly compared to the ease and timelessness of IWC’s Portugieser Perpetual Calendar.
Developed by Klaus himself in the 1980s, the perpetual calendar complication is a truly phenomenal piece of engineering and ingenuity. Replicating all the quirks of the Gregorian calendar within a mechanical wristwatch movement, it consists of just 80 parts and is easily adjusted using a single crown. Unlike a smartwatch, the Portugieser’s mechanical power reserve lasts for seven days and the calendar won’t need a manual correction until 2100, as it automatically recognises different month lengths and even adds a leap day every four years. In fact, its moon phase display is so precise it will only deviate from the actual phase of the moon by just one day after a mammoth 577.5 years.
But does the future-proofed wizardry of heirloom Haute Horlogerie outsmart the on-trend electronic gadgetry of a modern smartwatch?
IWC Schaffhausen believes in the beauty, inventiveness and sustainability of its watches but deliberately left each of the films’ endings open to encourage consumers to think about what ‘smart’ means to them personally. For some, a watch’s ability to take their pulse or count steps is truly clever; for others, a watch that will work just as effectively in the next century as it does today is also very smart…
Special thanks must go to Kurt Klaus, who joined IWC in 1957, and over six decades later, continues to be an iconic pioneer for our company and the entire watchmaking world.
