Apple v. Nokia: The battle of the feel-good television spots

FORTUNE — If, like me, you haven’t been watching much ad-supported TV this summer, you may have missed the dramatic miniseries being played out on what used to be called Madison Avenue — before so much of the business moved to the Coast.

The latest episodes pit Apple (AAPL), represented by BWA/Media Arts Lab, against Nokia (NOK), represented by WPP’s JWT.

Its pitches much improved since Scott Trattner returned from doing Samsung’s brilliant Superbowl spots, Apple has been playing the straight man, tugging at the heart strings with its “Every Day” series: photos, music, and now Face Time.

Nokia, fighting to reclaim with the Lumia 925 a piece of the mobile phone market it once owned outright, has been counterpunching with a vengeance. Emphasizing the superiority of its 8.7 megapixel camera, dual LED flash and Carl Zeiss lens, it turned iPhone subjects into zombies, lit them by the headlights of a passing car and in its most recent ad — released the same day as Apple’s painfully sincere Face Time spot above — borrowed Apple’s language and, at the 50-second point, some of its footage. See below.

Http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqfEE_X5cpQ

We now return to your regularly scheduled program.