“Garfield’s ‘Bobby’ awards honor the year’s best performance by an actor in a commercial. This year’s Best Male Performance was won by Justin Long and John Hodgman who play Mac and PC in the Apple Macintosh ads created by TBWA/Chiat/Day,” Bob Garfield reports for Advertising Age.
“Hodgman is a PC, earnest and uptight, and Long is a Mac, casually cool. Yes, PC is a doofus, but what so distinguishes these performances is how the two interact — affably and respectfully, in spite of the central premise. Long is cool not because he’s ultrahip but because he’s laid-back and confident, minus any trace of condescension,” Garfield reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Adam W.” for the heads up.]
For the next series of ads, Apple should use a Mac and a PC which will open with the lines “Hi, I’m a Mac user” and “And I’m a PC user.”
> I thought these Mac and PC characters pissed off every PC user on the planet.
No, I think PC users are “pissed” at Microsoft. Most of them know there is truth behind this commercials. Most PC users simply tolerate their Windows machines as a tool, and most are not “loyal” to Windows. It won’t take much to set off an avalanche of PC users who at least considering switching to Mac. That’s all Apple needs…
If peecee-using tv viewers were smart enough to “get” OS X, there’d be no need for commercials. I think the ads are great. If you’re a peecee user, the ads rub your nose in it, but very gently.
Someone get this man a job in marketting.
“Gentlemen, we have a problem. 97% of the world are currently using our competitors’ product. What do we do?”
“I know! We’ll air international TV spots that make us look smug, self-righteous and condescending. We’ll really rub the publics’ noses in it – show them how ignorant their last multi-thousand dollar investment was, despite the fact they probably couldn’t care less. They’ll lap it up.”
“Brilliant. Who’s for lunch?”
It won’t take much to set off an avalanche of PC users who at least considering switching to Mac. That’s all Apple needs…
That’s what I don’t understand about you people. Have you ever considered the consequences of this happening?
For starters, you’ll be left with an avalanch of Mac owners who don’t give a shit about Apple. They’d just as soon steal the latest version of osx than pay for it, which will probably lead to the shareholders forcing apple into implementing some form of lovely product activation. At the same time, you’ll catch the eye of the malware authors. L@@K FREE KITTY SCREENSAVERS! FREE WEB SEARCH SMILEY TOOLBAR! Then, people start talking about how their macs are spying on them and stealing their credit card numbers. After that lovely veneer of security osx enjoys gets a big old scratch, you get Norton and McAfee and Symantec throwing together some bloated “sollutions,” actively marketting macs as being insecure, which just go ahead and shit their computers up more.
Then you get Apple bending over ‘backwards’ to maintain backward compatibility. If it looks like they might have to make an architecture change at some point in the future for whatever reason – lol forget that! If there’s some crusty old part of UNIX somewhere that’s crying out for an overhaul but doing so would break half the industy’s legacy banking software, lol forget that! If this avalanch had happened a couple of years ago when Apple claimed IBM couldn’t deliver good enough laptop chips, do you think they’d just up and switch to these new 5x faster intel chips? lol forget that! Or if it’d happened a few years before that, do you think Apple would have binned everything and started again with a UNIX-based OS? Lol forget that! You’d still be rolling with a patched-to-shit version of OS9.
You really don’t seem to appreciate how good you have it in your relative obscurity. If I were you I’d be begging Apple NOT to advertise.