| Tuesday, July 11, 2006 |
13:37 - Mom! There's an MP3 player under my bed!
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1986008,00.asp
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Boy, talk about a poster child for the ever-popular "not getting it" movement:
The iSheep has been put out to pasture.
SanDisk, whose 'iSheep' ads provoked ridicule while the ads themselves poked fun at consumers who purchased Apple's iPod, has replaced the ads with a new mascot, the 'Lil' Monsta'. The new mascot's voracious nature is designed to showcase the need to fill wireless devices with all sort of media, the company said.
The iSheep website on Friday contained a Flash animation showing the ferocious Lil' Monsta flash tearing an iSheep to bloody bits.
Yeah.
Remember when Buy.com rolled out BuyMusic.com, right after the iTMS opened? Remember how its ads were a direct parody of Apple's own, featuring Tommy Lee of Motley Crüe grabbing up the iTMS's iconic sunburst guitar and smashing it to bits?
Looks like the tradition of competing with Apple through shocking images of random destructive violence is alive and well.
"So, what does SanDisk do? Lower prices? No," Mincey added. "Add more features? No. Make their players Mac compatible? No. Make it all work with iTunes, Mac or Windows. Nope. Instead, SanDisk does what you would expect of a company desperate for sales and market share. Insult the leader, right? No, they're busy insulting the leader's customers."
"We think that marketing for MP3 players has been much too serious, and so we are taking a tongue-in-cheek approach," said Nelson Chan, executive vice president and general manager of consumer products and corporate marketing, in a statement.
Heh. Yeah, the iPod ads sure are "serious", aren't they? Better do something about that. Like work out all your frustrations in a crude animation of eviscerating your competitors and their customers. Yeah, that's tongue-in-cheek. Sure makes me want to run right out and buy one.
I gotta give all these guys credit: the more stuff like this they do, the gladder I am that Apple's the one that got off to the early lead. It would be a pretty ugly market right now if companies like SanDisk and Creative and Microsoft were the ones defining its rules.
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste has some additional commentary on the market situation. No permalink, but go to 20060711.1415.
Incidentally, a quick visual census of 24 Hour Fitness at around midnight reveals that something like 90% of the pairs of ears on the various treadmilling and cross-trainering attendees were connected to iPods. Not MP3 players in general—iPods.
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Brian Tiemann
