| Tuesday, October 24, 2006 |
09:19 - Shame no longer
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It's no secret that Macs have always had an overwhelming presence in movies and (especially) TV commercials, what with your Netflixes and your Carfaxes and so on using PowerBooks and iMacs to show off their products. But up till now, whenever there was a Mac sighting in an ad, it was a matter of noticing the menu bar on the top of the screen, the black-with-white-border mouse pointer, or the telltale widgets of Safari when the camera zooms in for a stylized view of the company's URL. The companies usually made some effort to hide the fact that it was a Mac. Just because the ad agencies are Mac shops doesn't mean they want their client companies giving the impression that they're endorsing Apple products; so you don't see any Apple logos or application names, and they usually airbrush out the glowy logo on the back of the laptop.
Well, now there's a Nissan Sentra ad that shows a woman building her own car using Nissan's web app; and the computer she's using is an iMac. Not just "probably" either; not just a generic computer with a Mac-like body and OS X spliced onto the screen in post. There's beauty shot after beauty shot of the computer shown prominently front and center, the white bar-of-soap mouse, the iSight camera, and the big "iMac" badge on the back. They're not just not making a secret of it; it almost looks like they're going out of their way to call attention to some sort of implicit allegiance.
I guess maybe the iMac, or Apple in general, is gaining pop-culture traction, to the point where a Mac is what you get when you look up "computer" in the dictionary, like in the days of the 1984 Mac.
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Brian Tiemann
