iEgoism

Ok. We’ve all seen the slew of Macintosh ads featuring Justin Long and John Hodgeman. We try to fast forward through them on our Tivos, but, well, shit happens. And I love John Hodgeman. Alas, he has gone over to the dark side. I digress…

In opening up this week’s New Yorker, the pages immediately flipped open to a Mac ad, cleverly made of paper stiffer than the rest of the magazine complete with a little fold-out brochure. This annoyed me for two reasons. One: it makes the magazine a trifle hard to fold over and stick in my bag, and Two: I fucking hate Mac advertising.

“PCs are for the stuff we have to do, like pie charts and spreadsheets. Macs are for the stuff we want to do, like photos, music and movies.”

(I’ll let the grammatical context of this ad slide for now, though I believe they’re missing a few key verbs)

I have a PC. I don’t believe I have ever made a pie chart or a spreadsheet. I might have made a spreadsheet at work once or twice, and to be honest, I think it was on a Mac.

I recently had to write a discussion response for my Persuasion and Compliance Gaining class (don’t ask; it fills a requirement), in which I detailed a marketing campaign that used contrast or social comparison in an effort to persuade consumers. I used Macintosh’s marketing campaign as an example of this. They have taken the idea of the Mac versus PC “persona” to a literal level; they don’t even show their product in the advertisement anymore, it is simply two actors attempting to embody a brand of computer, from an Apple-biased standpoint. The initial Long/Hodgeman commercial revolves around the concept that Macs are, stated simply, “better.” This, of course, is entirely subjective to whoever is buying the product; it depends on what you are looking for. In Mac’s case, it often depends on how you want to look .

In some ways, it is an effective campaign, at least to reinforce Apple’s already loyal Mac customers. But one has to wonder, does insulting the competition really sway them to change brand loyalty? Listing off possible faults in PCs may not necessarily be the best way at winning over that demographic of computer users. Whether or not it is ethical is also subject to opinion. I personally don’t like this type of advertising; companies who ascribe this sort of egoistic approach to advertising generally turn me off (I can’t say that makes me more inclined to, say, Microsoft, or Dell, but I can’t think offhand of a similar marketing campaign on their part, but then I try not to watch commercials and believe that advertising is the bane of American society. Well, that and religion. But that’s a whole other blog entry).

You are not your computer. If you were, you'd be better at binary.