Apple Gets Creative With Mac Ads

that Is creative, but it still doesn’t sell me on a Mac.

making, or trying to make, the masses switch from a PC to a Mac is a tough sell

@1
Vista has done more for the argument to make the switch than Apple or the Linux camp could ever hope to achieve. Vista may well be “better” than XP underneath but is just *so* different that people are naturally wary.

Yeah, noticed this on Engadget yesterday, and actually “noticed” it as opposed to glossing over it. Definitely a creative and more effective approach to ads.

Wow, love it. Very creative indeed. Probably the best ad format I’ve ever seen online.

I love the originality of the idea, I just don’t like that they sell their product by badmouthing the competitors. Bad sportsmanship, I say.

kudos to the ad maker

Apple UK started doing something like this (characters playing in the ad format) several months ago. I’m guessing their ideas caught on! I put a video of it on YouTube at the time.. bear in mind it’s the UK PC & Mac guys.

PC and Mac are represented here in the UK by comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb. Webb (Mac) is a skinny cool-sort-of-guy while Mitchell (PC) is fat and round-faced, so the advertisers obviously thought they’d found a good match. Of course, in their various works Webb tends to play characters who are thick, shallow and annoying, while Mitchell tends to play intelligent and likable if insecure characters. So it’s an even more perfect fit, but not in the way Apple intended.

@5: Apple could run an advert in which they cut a cat’s throat in front of her kittens, then stamped on the kittens one by one as some tosser declaimed “This is what using a PC is like”, and the fanboys would still love them. They’d probably win even more awards for originality. Negative advertising is arrogant and irritating - comparing prices and concrete stats is ok (if done honestly), but just going ‘hahaha these guys suck’ makes you look like an arsehole, because you are. But Apple, a gigantic corporation that sells overpriced electronic goods and is even more obsessed with making people do things ‘their way’ than Microsoft, is treated by hacks and fans as if it was a local mom and pop outfit that can do no wrong.

Never underestimate the power of positioning yourself as a beleaguered and oppressed minority. What works for fundamentalist Christians and Muslims also works for savvy marketers. Whether you are actually oppressed or whether you’re even actually a minority is totally irrelevant.

if mac is so good why do they keep attacking vista?
that must be because of the bad feeling of being minority
after all its a technology, you use whichever better fits you, its not a religion or sth.

@5 I couldn’t agree more. If Mac is so great why not promote its benefits over Vista? Bad mouthing your competitors can only take you so far..

@5 I couldn’t agree with you more. Beat the competition with innovative tehcnologies, not through attempts at publicizing their weaknesses. But then again, I think Apple is already miles ahead of Microsoft in terms of innovation.

@10 Great minds think alike!

OMG That is freaking hilarious! I LOVE it!!! Yup, I’m an Apple fanboy, and proud of it. Been a Mac user since ‘84, which makes me a dinosaur fossile Apple fanboy.

what Apple needs to do, to reassure that the Mac is ‘real’…is to have it distributed to all the big box retailers, next to their shelve displays of the PC’s

people know what the Mac is, but it still is a relatively ‘mystery’ computer - relative to the foundation of the PC

There used to be a convention in advertising that you didn’t directly name a competitor in an ad, but that went by the boards with the Pepsi Challenge. I think Apple has been smart to key in on the fact that younger consumers today grow up in a culture of snarky sarcasm where standards are few and far between. So ridiculing a competitor is considered cool.

Microsoft, as the dominant player in the space, has been careful not to elevate Apple’s importance by directly attacking them in ads, but with bricked iPhones, Leopard install glitches, etc. it’s not as if they don’t have ammunition they could fire back if they wanted to.

Very clever ad. Of course part of the reason you pay through the nose for Apple products is to subsidize this sort of very expensive marketing.

I wonder what portion of the cost of your Mac comprises advertising?

I saw this ad yesterday and was totally confused. The problem was that I scrolled down to where the “DON’T GIVE UP” part was off screen, so I had no idea what was going on.

Creative, but Apple’s jabs at M$ are still tacky.

Yes, the ad is clever. But is the PC still Apple’s primary competitor?

Car Donation NYC:

In computers obviously yes, it is. What else could it possibly be other than the PC?

In the iPod/iTunes world they have numerous competitors who trail far behind, at least in terms of mind share.

thanks, now i understand what’s the ad meaning. when first saw it, i don’t even look at the top of the page.

May be creative but it’s poorly integrated - users have complained about crashing browsers, freezing, memory hogging and sound problems. Very irritating unless you are on a high-speed connection that can stream the video, the buffering is poorly done resulting in a looped video with no pause function.

Apple should stop whilst they are kind of amusing if somewhat based on loose ‘facts’, it’s getting lame pretty fast.

great use of different ad space but I think apple ads need to appeal to non apple users and slagging off the window users (making them look dumb) is really not the way to do it.

I use both mac and pc and they both their ups and downs.

They did a nice job of move from TV to online format with out being too annoying.

You know, Apple’s ads work for me. I know it’s just advertisement and they’re playing with you to get you to go buy one. But it’s working with me. I want one.

Cool video, I have always thought that Apple is guru especially in field of design and also in field of advertising.

@ Xell - “May be creative but it’s poorly integrated - users have complained about crashing browsers, freezing, memory hogging and sound problems. ”

Maybe they should get a Mac. [ducking]

instead of writing this up as a blog post, why don’t you simply digg it…it appears that’s where this posting came from to begin with (the ad campaign has been highlighted on digg several times over recent hours starting yesterday i believe)…

careful, the TC folks are mac fantards

It’s clever use of the Flash ‘Shared Objects’ in Flash - which can allow two Flash objects to ‘talk’ to each other. (We use them on podcast.com for the ‘playnow’ and ‘add to playlist’ buttons)

But, I’m amazed that an ad is getting ‘news’ coverage. (and listed on techmeme)

When ads become ‘tech news’ then I think we’re really screwing ourselves

The agency who created it must be creaming.

Cleaver ad, their best so far. Maybe I should switch to a Mac. I mean, I’d be the cool guy at the coffee shop that looks hip because he has the latest fad. While I am at it, because I am so insecure and rely on pop culture to define my identity, I should buy the most popular clothes, get an iPhone, ipod and start listening to some top 40. I mean, I would rather be the 1337 d00d with an STD, than chubby and made fun of; because my own insecurities, ya know.

I can’t wait for the “next” thing Mac comes out with, I need an identity, hurry please and help me fit in.

http://www.beercosoftware.com/.....d-so-what/
beercosoftware.com/blog/2007/10/26/what-did-installing-osx-leopard-nuke/

Most of the Mac stuff is total fud. Linux is way better and it’s free.
“but if you try it……”
Dude, don’t even go there if that’s what you were thinking, we use Mac here every stinking day. That being said, I would use a Mac before Windows any day of the week. Just never before Linux.
The ads, well they are teh geh.

The free markets have yelled out pretty loud where the Apple platform fits. It has lots of good applications, but it never has and never will become a market leader in personal computing.

Their well executed marketing campaigns are entertaining, but other than feeding the mac zealots inferiority complexes, they have little impact on changing market share.

Anyone else notice a web outage today?
My blog is down and so is Laughing Squid.
Wonder if it’s a repeat of the RackSpace outage a short while back.

I think the ads are having some issues on news.com. When this ad first showed up the “Don’t Give Up” banner wasn’t there. Now it’s there, but only lights up once unlike the Mac Rumors sighting.

Personally, I think it’s better without the banner. The off-screen, “Pulp Fiction”-esque “What’s in the Briefcase” glow was what made click to hear with sound in the first place. It’d be a more intriguing ad if it wasn’t spelled out.

man these posts have been a real snoozefest lately…apple has an advertisement? facebook removes 1 word from newsfeed? zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

why not do some coverage of the amazon web services startup challenge finalists or something, anything!

does this kind of thing be longs to TechCrunch.. why you guys are making this place like any other out of school boy’s blog?

The ad is funny, would have been a funnier one if it was more subtile…but I think you can make a good ad without bashing the competition, even Microsoft.

You can see the ad on CNET’s main Vista page:
http://www.cnet.com/windows-vista.html

Am I the only one who HATES those ads? They are annoying, obnoxious, and obvious.

I love this idea… I wish all online ads were this entertaining can clever.

Must see for dumbass Mactards. Otherwise irrelevant.

YaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaYY ADS!

Dear America: we have problems. Please Solve. Thanks.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/200....._poll_dc_2

Kewl man, let us know when McDonalds posts an ad on TC. It’ll be groundbreaking.

The Mac ads are entertaining but don’t give any good reason to switch anymore. They used to offer up what a Mac would offer but now all they do is make fun of their competitors.

Thats like tearing down another person because you dont have anything to offer yourself. Bad manners.

@ All the Mac Haters

APPLE IS NOT SIMPLY A COMMODITY PRODUCT!!! They are not competing with the PC by becoming the PC. I guess I have to resort to the cliche quality over quantity.

If you’ve ever tried the pepsi challenge for mac vs. PC you’ll never turn back.

Disclosure: I’m a Mac guy (hence my blog), but I’m trying to familiarize myself with Linux via Ubuntu for its open source functionality.

I enjoy the ads and recognize them for what they are. That doesn’t make them any less entertaining. By the way being a retired college professor in the computer science field I of course taught PC based applications etc. however after trying a Mac several years ago I’m a convert! So much more stable and useful than a PC!
My Dell just sits in the corner for the most part while I use my MacBookPro with Leopard!

We had a tacit agreement that the iTards would stop these stupid yet highly effective “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials! When I saw three new ones after a few months of none, I got so mad that I tried to throw a chair, but I was in my office and they are all bolted down!

The only thing they’re creative at is buying up ideas from people, or ripping them off:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/0.....f-artists/

The ironic thing is, you don’t have to “Give up on Vista [and PCs]” to go Mac…

In fact, a Mac makes a very good Vista machine. I dual-boot (triple-boot) between Mac OS X Leopard, Windows XP Pro, and Windows Vista Ultimate.

I’ll probably never buy a PC again, but that doesn’t mean I’m cut off from Windows…

I am more of a PC guy but I love the Add

Compared to Apple, Microsoft might be considered an Open Source company.

Its not so much what the Mac/PC ads mean or what message Mac is trying to send out or even that they are trying to recruit PC users…..the ad campaign is just old now and kinda annoying.

I have always thought Mac’s were kinda cool, and I’ve even entertained the idea of buying one. But these commercials do nothing to motivate me towards that–in fact it turns me away. If you can’t advertise your product on it’s own positive merits, then in my mind you have nothing to advertise. Plus, let’s face it, unless you work in a graphic design shop or something of the likes, you’re never going to use a Mac at work. That’s the real reason Apple will never get market share. I really can’t see that an advertising campaign targeted towards teenagers, or being cool, will at all appeal to big business–the people that actually spend money on large quantities of hardware, software, and operating systems. The most you’ll get out of the teenagers who think these commercials are great, is maybe the initial hardware purchase–after that everything else will be ripped from LimeWire, or their buddies. Nice try Apple.

Regarding the web outage today mentioned above… yup, here too. So I glad I bought .Mac and paid for expedited shipping; took 5 days to arrive and now I can’t activate because the site is down.