| Thursday, July 4, 2002 |
11:54 - "Switch" Parodies
http://www.macedition.com/partingshot/partingshot_20020628.jpg
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It's really hard to tell how well the "Switch" ads are going over. Among the loud voices on the Net, the impression is that the ads are annoying and insulting, and decrease people's opinion of Apple and their likelihood of buying a Mac. But on a grass-roots scale, people at work and people I casually meet tell me that the ads have in fact been eye-opening, and that now they're considering making their next computer a Mac.
So which is the bigger group?
I'm tempted to think that there's a positive sign in the parodies. Like the picture above. This is good parody. This is the kind of satire that takes off from the substrate and makes your brain warp itself, unlike that site I linked to a while back that emulated the entire Switch site in look and feel while consisting of ill-informed, outdated yammerings and a spoof version of the movies that had been redone crappily in Windows Media format, just to add insult to insult.
But now we're seeing more of the funny kind-- and I daresay the picture shown here isn't necessarily by Mac people. The spoofs at macboy.com are, but they're also quite funny and worth a look.
I don't know where Apple plans to take the Switch campaign next-- I've heard that the next round is supposed to feature a few actual celebrities in the mix. They do need to do something... this experiment is volatile, and it needs some adjustment and fine-tuning. I hope they know what they're doing.
UPDATE: Turns out that "Lacrimosa" from above is a "Parting Shot" published by the guys at MacEdition ... it had been sent to me as the bare image URL, and being scatterbrained as I tend to be on non-work-days, I didn't bother following it up. But I wrote a whole post about it anyway.
So as it turns out, the funny Switch parodies are coming from Mac people, almost exclusively, at least so far. So if anything remains of my point, I suppose it's that the trend is toward funny parody and away from the really vicious stuff... which I'll take any day.
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