Everybody wants to be Apple. Of course that's been the case for many years. And even though, in this spot, Amazon tries to brush off Apple like some failed, late 90's dot-com, I think they secretly have a little Apple envy in their system:
Man: Hey excuse me -- that's the new Kindle, isn't it, $79.
Woman: Best way to read, even in sunlight.
Great work, stop it right here. The commercial should be over at the 10 second mark. The Kindle is an awesome eReader. It does this one thing better than any other machine. Amazon differentiated itself, made its point clearly, and now they can call it a day.
Or, they can ruin the commercial....
Man: Yeah but I mean if you want to watch movies or surf the web.
Woman: I've got a Kindle Fire for that (looks a hundred feet away to a different Amazon tablet product being used by her children.)
"PUNT!" This has got to be one of the few examples in advertising where a company just throws its hands in the air, curses the heavens and says, "We give up." To have your only rebuttal be "No, but we make something else that does that" is just sad.
No one is going to carry around two devices. "This one's for readin', and this one's for videoin'." The woman's response should be that the regular Kindle isn't trying to be all things to all people -- it does one thing (displays text), and it does it well. It's for readers. End of story.
Man: Three Kindles. That's gotta be expensive.
Woman: Not really. Together, they're still less than that (points to Man's iPad.)
Yeah, fine, the iPad 2, at $499, is expensive. It's also far and away the top tablet on the market. But I can find a 16GB iPad for less than the $477 combined price of those three Amazon products. And I know this is a store return, but I still find it funny that the first one I found was on Amazon.
Man: Someone sitting here?
Woman: My husband.
Man: Yeah...
And a weird, anticlimactic ending to boot. Was there really enough sexual tension between these two that the audience had to see how the interaction ultimately ended? And judging by the man's resignation, he appears to be jealous of the unseen man's wife simply because this family owns three Kindles. So peculiar.
Amazon, this is not the way to go after Apple. You make fine, lower-cost products, and there's a market for that. But you don't make iPads -- and expecting people to haul around two tablet devices instead of buying an iPad is laughably dumb. So stick with your strategy -- and don't bring up Apple unless you actually have a claim to make.
Leave it to Apple to concoct the smarmiest, most defensive ad campaign of the year.
Smug Douchebag Announcer: "If you don't have an iPhone, you don't have iBooks. So you don't have your favorite books in your pocket."
The emphasis on "your" there is weird, like if you buy an Android Phone it jams a hundred books you don't like down your pants. "Hey! Get out of there, the complete Dean Koontz oeuvre!"
SDA: "And you don't have the iBook store, an entire bookstore in your pocket."
Just in case you couldn't figure out what "the iBook store" could possibly be referring to, here's another whole clause!
SDA: "So whether you're looking for a certain author or a New York Times best-seller, a good book is just a tap away."
Certainly not true of any other product!
SDA: "Yup, if you don't have an iPhone, well, you don't have an iPhone."
Tautology moves a lot of product, let me tell you.
The whole series of these ads is so obnoxiously smug that, frankly, it completely turns me off from ever wanting an iPhone. And it's not just that they treat themselves like the hottest shit on the planet. Take this ad, for instance - the iPhone is trying to throw its body in front of e-readers like Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook, and etc. And that's all well and good, I guess, except that the iPhone isn't really a competitor to those products. It's a phone. It's great how much other stuff it does, but if I want to read a book and don't want an actual book, I'm going to get an e-reader. The iPhone screen is like four inches! Yeah, can't wait to be hunched over Moby-Dick on a screen that size. It's like that T-Mobile commercial that brags about the phone that comes preloaded with Inception, as though anyone is excited to watch Inception, a film noteworthy for its visuals, on a tiny screen in the palm of their hand. I swear, sometimes I feel like the more things they make smartphones do, the less excited I am about it. I want a phone that makes calls and can surf the internet. I don't need to watch tiny, tiny movies or read tiny, tiny books. There are other devices that can do those things on the go in a way that isn't completely stupid, and if I need to do them that badly, I'll get one of those devices.
Are there 80 million variants on how much of a stupid jerk you are for not having an iPhone? Of course there are.
SDA: "If you don't have an iPhone, you don't have an iPod in your phone."
A necessary thing that everyone should have! Also, pretty much every smartphone plays music, asshole.
SDA: "With your music, and your playlists."
Again with the overemphasis on how this will be stuff you like, as though it's not true of anything else. Windows Phone finds out what music you like and then deliberately recommends completely unrelated tracks. Android phones come preloaded exclusively with fifteen remixes of "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas. I know the idea is how great it is that the iPhone can sync to iTunes, but really, BFD.
SDA: "And you don't have iTunes on your phone, the world's #1 music store."
Hey, have you heard of iTunes? No? Well, apparently it's some kind of music store. Good thing they told us that, or this ad would have been really confusing. Now it's time for some applesauce - open wide for the airplane!
(My phone, which is not an iPhone as you can probably guess, comes with direct access to the Amazon.com MP3 store, which is basically the exact same thing as the iTunes store. So... no, Apple, I really don't care.)
SDA: "With Genius, that recommends new music based on the songs you already have."
Do not care. At all. Every online music company in the world recommends music based on your established likes. And who buys songs on their phone based on a recommendation without even listening to them first?
SDA: "Yup, if you don't have an iPhone, go fuck yourself."
Well, maybe he didn't say that. But he may as well have. I find the tone of ads like this completely counterproductive. It's 30 seconds of telling any iPhone-less viewer that they're an idiot for not having one because it's just that great. Why would you want to talk down to consumers? Unless that was the point...
Adman 1: Okay, time to get to work on the new iPhone commercial, guys. What should we focus on?
Adman 2: All the great features!
Adman 3: The ways in which it's better than other phones!
Adman 4: The douchey self-satisfaction you get from owning one!
Adman 5: The inherent superiority of iPhone owners to other humans!
Adman 1: Those are all pretty great ideas. Anyone have a slogan?
Adman 4: "If you don't have an iPhone, go get one right now, you stupid twit!"
Adman 5: "If you don't have an iPhone, you probably also don't have a BRAIN!"
Adman 1: Okay, um, not bad, but maybe a little bit too on the nose. We don't want to insult potential customers.
Adman 5: We don't?
Adman 4: The iPhone is still made by Apple, right? I mean, have you ever seen an Apple ad before? Those Mac vs. PC ads are classic examples of insulting the consumer!
Adman 5: Apple products sell themselves by word of mouth. The whole point of the TV ads is just to make people who already own Apple products feel even more satisfied with themselves than they already do. They're like "attaboy" pats on the back for people who own Apple stuff.
Adman 1: Wow. Okay. What about something like "If you don't have an iPhone, you don't have an iPhone?"
Adman 4: ...maybe. But can you get the guy talking to sound like he's much, much better than anyone who doesn't have one?
Adman 5: Gotta have that sense of superiority. It justifies the inflated purchase price.
Adman 1: Okay, I think we're all done here.
The iPhone! If you don't have one, how are you supposed to feel like a better person than all the other losers?
I have always hated the Mac vs. PC ads. The primary reason is that I find them unforgivably smug, but I'm also a PC user who hasn't been a fan of the Mac interface historically, so I've resisted criticizing them because I thought I might just come off as "kinda bitter PC-using guy." But at the risk of doing that, this ad is fucking retarded.
I'm okay - in an "annoyed by the ads, but at least seeing their effectiveness in conveying their message" kind of way - with a lot of the ads in this series. But this one just sucks. I don't care if Mac wants to make ads about "oh, peripherals are easier to use on a Mac" or "Macs don't get spyware and viruses" - they're still smug as all get-out, but at least they can be smug with some justification.
This ad, though? Not so much. I suppose it was just bad luck that Apple went with the Claymation gimmick right at the same time as Alltel - whose ads, frankly, look a lot better as Rankin/Bass parodies than does this one - so I won't give them any grief about being unoriginal (although parody, by its nature, is kind of unoriginal). My issue with this ad is that it's barely even an ad. Does it tell us anything about the Mac? No. Does it tell us why Macs are better than PCs? No. All it does is say, "Look what a dork PC is! Huh? Huh?" It's not a commercial for a Mac, it's a 30-second excuse for Mac owners to feel smug and cool. It's preaching to the converted. Basically, it's a total waste of money. Do you know what Mac's market share is? Less than 7%. Wow! Granted, that number has been growing in recent years... but it's grown all the way to 7%. Windows machines, meanwhile, are well over 90%. I think it's a little early for Apple to drop the "here's why Macs are better" campaign in exchange for a "PCs suck, haw haw" campaign, given that the latter is directed almost exclusively at people who are already Mac users and there just aren't that many of them.
I'm convinced that the only people who like ads like this are the people who already use the product and dislike the competition that's being mocked, so why do companies think ads like this are going to work? At least when Pepsi does it I can think, "Well, it's not like they have much to say about how much better their product is given that it tastes almost exactly the same." If the differences between Macs and PCs are enormous, maybe you want to highlight that. What happens when you make fun of PCs - and, by extension, their users - for being stupid and uncool is not that everyone using a PC goes, "Oh man! What was I thinking?" What happens is a lot of them get turned off by your message and resolve not to use Macs even when you point out the differences.
Mac market share has ticked up a little since this ad campaign started, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that has more to do with general Mac awareness and the fact that Apple makes other popular products (like the iPod) that get people into the Apple store and generally more into the brand. I really don't think anyone is seeing this ad and thinking, "Man, that guy representing the entire range of PCs is less cool than that Mac dude. Why am I not using a Mac right this very second?" Fucking say something about why your product is better. You know, like you do in your other ads, the ones that don't suck quite as much.
Hey, it's me, Quivering, again. Turns out that pouring all my money into hedge funds was kind of a bust. Toyota really screwed me on that one. So it's back to the ol' making-fun-of-shitty-ads grind.
Let me introduce you to a new series of commercials from perennial maker-of-commercials Apple Computer. Now, historically, Apple deserves a lot of credit. Their 1984 SuperBowl spot is widely heralded as one of the best in advertising history, and possibly the most famous. Their "Think Different" campaign, although inherently ungrammatical, helped differentiate the Mac from PCs in the consumer's mind. And, more recently, their iPod commercials, which utilized a blend of hip, upbeat music and arresting art direction, propelled Apple from a niche computer company to a mainstream music industry titan.
Apple's latest advertising support of the iPhone, their second campaign for the product, takes a significant change in direction. Here's one in the series:
Pilot: We were departing Chicago in route to Newark, New Jersey, and we were told we were going to have a 3-hour delay.
Hey, we've all been there. Airport delays, even those of the 3-hour variety, are fairly commonplace.
Pilot: Three hours. For an hour and forty-one minute flight.
Big deal. Everyone who has ever flown on an airplane has had bad delays. Three hours, four hours, a full day even. Once, I was in Amsterdam, and they delayed the flight because they couldn't get an exit light inside the cabin to turn off. They had to fly in a mechanic from Detroit to fix it, so they put us all up in a Novotel overnight. It was a 30-hour delay. But you don't see me going out and making some shitty commercial because of it!
Pilot: And as we were sitting there with our engines shut down, I turned on my iPhone and went to Weather.com...
Took 12 seconds to mention the product. Not so good.
Pilot: ...and I saw that the rain showers had already passed the field. At which point, we contacted our dispatcher, and dispatch took another look at the weather...
Bullshit. Weather.com is more sophisticated than whatever they use to make takeoff and landing decisions at airports? I'm sorry, I've used Weather.com before, and reliability is not its selling point. I think vacation destination temperature-checking is. If Weather.com is better than what air traffic control is using, I refuse to fly again. (Good thing it's not.)
Pilot: ... and sure enough, about thirty minutes later, Tower called us and said, "You guys are clear to go."
I hope they reminded you to turn off that cell phone before the flight.
Pilot: And everyone was happy and life was good.
What a sophomoric, artificially tidy way to end the commercial. "Life was good"! "Everybody was happy!" They disabled ground radar and replaced it with an iPhone! With the iPhone in charge, everybody's flight got in an hour early! Then the iPhone cured cancer!
This is just one of the several ads featuring this "just a regular person" testimonial format. What's lame about this concept is that it completely abandons the "cool" persona that Apple's cultivated with colorful, fun commercials like those for the iPod. What's painful about this concept is that it's unblushingly egotistical. The iPhone -- better than an air traffic control tower? Really?
Take a look at the professions of two of the other actors featured in these testimonial iPhone ads: a "mobile-blogging" Ballet Dancer and an Off-Broadway Producer. I guess they couldn't get a professional Cuban Cigar Cutter to do an ad? Get off your hundred-foot high horse, Apple. It's like the entire marketing department eats apricot quail sandwiches for lunch every day.
Another person in one of these ads begins by stating, confidently:
One of the greatest advancements in the history of mankind. Without question.
The jury's still out on this, of course, but I think we can all safely say this falls in the "massive, inexcusable hyperbole" camp. Do you think it's okay to have some fawning statement like that in your ad, Apple, because some random guy said it? You still put it in your commercial, and then you aired the thing! Surely someone at Apple or TBWA Chiat Day realizes how obnoxious that sounds.
There's another issue with this whole campaign, and it's this idea of Apple's supposed invention of some futuristic dream device. "It's the internet... on your phone." "It's The New York Times... on your phone." "You can check the weather... on your goddamned phone." It smacks of goofy ads from the sixties about space-age automobiles, or color TVs. The kind of ads that you look at now and laugh.
50 years in the future, some 12-year old kid's grandfather will say to him, "You know, grandson, when I was a youngster, you couldn't reroute a plane on your phone." And the kid will say, "No, way! That's so stone age!" Then he'll whip out his iWatch, which will have already detected the conversation and called up this iPhone ad on its holographic screen. The kid will watch the ad and think to himself, "God, that is retarded. I really hope someone in the past made fun of that pretentious piece of shit."
Don't worry, snarky little 12-year-old from the future, someone did. Oh, yes, someone did.
