Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Friday, July 26, 2002
11:01 - De Ads	(top)
Forum this morning on NPR was all about "Advertising in a down economy"-- patriotic Americana-style ads and the like-- and one of the panelists casually mentioned Apple's "Switch" ads while making a point about testimonials. That casual mention resulted, when the phones were opened up later, in a storm of people who evidently were just itching for a chance to weigh in about those ads, and to make the entire discussion be about them if possible. And it worked, or at least it was working by the time I parked and turned off the radio. One guy called in and talked about how the "Switch" ads are the first time Apple has really tackled the angle that stands a chance of growing their market share-- namely, that people see the Mac as a vulnerable outlier that you have to swim upstream to use, and that the only way they're going to be convinced to make that effort is to see other people who have done so telling their stories (rather than, say, the "artsy-fartsy" ads they've always done in the past that win Clios but don't convince anybody to buy Macs). The panelists responded with vague analysis-ese, and then the host threw open the question of specific targeted technology to the whole panel. She asked about the Ellen Feiss ad, the stoned-looking high-school girl. This ad is apparently not going to air on TV, according to Apple-- but it's featured prominently on the website. Now, all the "stoner" jokes have been made already... but to the panel, the girl doesn't just look like a stoner-- she is a stoner. She's meant to look as wasted as possible. Not just clueless, but vacuous, red-eyed, intoxicated, missing any and all grip on reality. And the host's proposal was that Apple's showing this ad in an online-only format was a means of specifically targeting the disenfranchised socially-inept technophile crowd, rather than whoever is watching TV. "Guerrilla advertising", they were calling it when I rolled into the parking lot. From the sound of it, the entire rest of the show was going to be about the Apple ads unless someone physically stopped it. I wonder whether that means simply that rabid Mac people are overrepresented among NPR listeners, or something... As for the efficacy of the ads themselves, though, as I was just now saying to someone in e-mail, by way of answering the seemingly common charge that they present a message of "Hi, I'm too stupid to use a PC, so I bought a Mac": Some of the ads are in fact targeted that way (to people who honestly feel threatened by the complexity of their PCs-- who do in fact make up a large proportion of society, larger than most techie types realize); others of them feature people who are very techno-savvy, like the IT administrators and programmers and so on, who are trying to explain that the Mac has benefits for the intelligent as well. It depends on which ones you remember best, I guess. I would imagine that in a broad-based ad campaign like this, in which they try to address all facets of society, people will remember the ads that speak directly to them least well, and instead remember the ones that seem to be making inaccurate assumptions about the viewer-- and that may be a hidden flaw in the campaign. Personally I think the ads are very risky, but potentially have a lot of payoff. They're already by far the most parodied ad campaign Apple has ever done, both in funny ways and in very mean ways. Most of the tech punditry has reviled them (cf. John Dvorak's comments in PC Magazine). But for the everyday people watching TV, who don't follow blogs or read tech magazines, they might do pretty well. And in any case, what's that they say about there being no such thing as bad press? At least they wouldn't be able to make a Simpsons episode today in which Homer mentions Apple Computers-- and is rebuffed by a clerk who says, "What Computers?" If the numbers Apple quotes are accurate at all (over 1.7 million hits on the Switch site since the campaign started, 60% of which are from PC users), it seems to be off to a good start. And the sooner they air the Will Farrell one, the better...