April 21st, 2009
The Mac ads: Still simple, still entertaining
The PC ad war is in full swing, with Apple’s new lineup of commercials just starting to hit the TV airwaves. Funny thing, though, these commercials are countering Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” campaign. Nope, they’re the same as always.
Simple, yet entertaining.
Fellow ZDNet blogger Andrew Nusca posted a good read this morning that dove deeper into the differences between what Apple is doing and what Microsoft is doing. The headline - Why Apple’s new ad campaign is genius, and why Microsoft can’t win as ‘PC’ - sums it up nicely but the post itself doesn’t beat up on Microsoft as much as you might think. Microsoft is all about value - hence the big focus on price with the laptop hunters. Apple, on the other hand, is focusing on quality of the products and ease of use. (My favorite, by far, is “Legal Copy.”)
That’s all fine and dandy - value versus quality. In both cases, the companies are going to put themselves in a positive light in the ad.
But a TV commercial - which I usually fast-forward through on the DVR - also needs to be entertaining, funny even. Microsoft is getting better - and we’ve almost even forgotten the lame attempts at humor via the Jerry Seinfeld ads - but nothing yet has come close to matching the long-running and still-entertaining “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign.
Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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