My favorite ad from the big game the other night (oh, by the way, I am glad my prediction was wrong as concerns the actual footballing: Go Packers), was Motorola’s ad for their new tablet. Hoping to grab some market share aware from Apple’s dominant iPad, Motorola went straight for the jugular. That it was successful speaks to the brilliance of the marketing team that created the ad, and to the ripeness of attacks on the technology shibboleth, Apple.
During the 1984 Super Bowl Apple made one of the more famous commercials of all time, featuring a defiant woman throwing a hammer through a giant projection screen featuring Big Brother from George Orwell’s classic book. The ad states that, because of Apple, 1984 will not be like 1984. However, now Apple has become what they purported to overthrow, a massive corporation whose users exhibit slave-like, obsessive devotion to their products. Steve Jobs operates as the prophet to the Apple-ites. Every new product is treated as an oracle from above. As I sit and type this (on an Apple computer!) in the school’s library I am surrounded by other Mac users and the white computer with the bitten apple logo is a staple for being taken seriously as a counter cultural insider at local coffee shops. The white earbuds connected to an iPod are visible on half a dozen people from my vantage point. Here we all are, not conforming... together.
Which made this ad extraordinary. Not because I give a crap about the Motorola tablet. Why in the world would I prefer one multi-billion dollar company’s product to another’s? That’s not what this is about anyway. Why sacrifice the cool factor, the in-factor, of the iPad for a Motorola look-alike? The slogan “A tablet to create a better world” is inane, and plays in to the same sort of technological triumphalism that has made Apple’s shtick seem old. How exactly does a slightly different tablet computer make the world a better place? As far as product selling goes the ad may or not be effective. As social commentary, though, the commercial said everything it needed to say.
This wasn’t the first time someone has taken on Apple in an ad campaign. A couple of years ago, HP did largely the same thing in a spot where they give hip looking youngsters a wad of cash with which to buy a computer. Deciding Apple was too expensive, and that they just weren’t “cool” enough to buy one, the attractive hipsters went with an HP model and pocketed the extra cash. Those ads were good and proved a point, but not quite as artistically as what Motorola has accomplished.
The Motorola spot went right after the 1984 aesthetic. The monotonous white clothing, everyone with their white earbuds waiting for a white train on a white subway platform and working in a sterile, white office all remind the viewer of the pervasive whiteness of Apple’s products (not to mention its users). The man is reading a copy of 1984 on his Motorola tablet. The romance angle mimics that between Winston and Julia in the Ministry of Truth. Of course the ad doesn’t show what happens to Winston and Julia at the end of the book, but the idea of breaking out of the ordinary and accepted has a certain appeal. Also, the fact that the defiant couple look like a couple of standard issue Apple users helps to further the effectiveness of the ad. I love it when an ad can tell a compelling story, and Motorola spent their $6 million to tell a great story.
There is much to appreciate in the ad, many angles from which to mock Apple and things like Apple. And this is one of my favorite. The famous and hilarious website Stuff White People Like chronicles just these sort of mock defiant postures and preferences adopted by the (mostly) white, (mostly) upper middle class who imagine they are exerting individuality in becoming exactly like one another. Indeed, the subtitle to SWPL’s first print book is, “Your Guide to the Unique Tastes of Millions.”
Which couldn’t really say it better. At this point can you really imagine yourself to be more counter cultural for buying a Mac instead of a PC? An iPad instead of a Kindle or the Motorola thingy? Well, in a sense, yes. This is exactly the thrust of Apple’s marketing. Buy our computer because you are unique, artistic, visionary, and nothing says that like owning our computer products. And when you see someone else with the same white laptop (preferably in a coffee shop brewing “free trade” coffee) you can share a knowing nod, you are after all fellow revolutionaries in the war to bring down the madness of corporate excess from companies like Microsoft, not to mention so very creative. And it is brilliant advertising. Everyone wants to feel this way. And if the barrier to entry is spending a little more on a laptop you need anyway, why not make the jump? Heck, I just ruined my laptop and am looking for ways to justify buying a Mac. I am everything I am railing against. But I can appreciate a joke directed at me and people like me, and on this score Motorola had a zinger the other night.
During the 1984 Super Bowl Apple made one of the more famous commercials of all time, featuring a defiant woman throwing a hammer through a giant projection screen featuring Big Brother from George Orwell’s classic book. The ad states that, because of Apple, 1984 will not be like 1984. However, now Apple has become what they purported to overthrow, a massive corporation whose users exhibit slave-like, obsessive devotion to their products. Steve Jobs operates as the prophet to the Apple-ites. Every new product is treated as an oracle from above. As I sit and type this (on an Apple computer!) in the school’s library I am surrounded by other Mac users and the white computer with the bitten apple logo is a staple for being taken seriously as a counter cultural insider at local coffee shops. The white earbuds connected to an iPod are visible on half a dozen people from my vantage point. Here we all are, not conforming... together.
Which made this ad extraordinary. Not because I give a crap about the Motorola tablet. Why in the world would I prefer one multi-billion dollar company’s product to another’s? That’s not what this is about anyway. Why sacrifice the cool factor, the in-factor, of the iPad for a Motorola look-alike? The slogan “A tablet to create a better world” is inane, and plays in to the same sort of technological triumphalism that has made Apple’s shtick seem old. How exactly does a slightly different tablet computer make the world a better place? As far as product selling goes the ad may or not be effective. As social commentary, though, the commercial said everything it needed to say.
This wasn’t the first time someone has taken on Apple in an ad campaign. A couple of years ago, HP did largely the same thing in a spot where they give hip looking youngsters a wad of cash with which to buy a computer. Deciding Apple was too expensive, and that they just weren’t “cool” enough to buy one, the attractive hipsters went with an HP model and pocketed the extra cash. Those ads were good and proved a point, but not quite as artistically as what Motorola has accomplished.
The Motorola spot went right after the 1984 aesthetic. The monotonous white clothing, everyone with their white earbuds waiting for a white train on a white subway platform and working in a sterile, white office all remind the viewer of the pervasive whiteness of Apple’s products (not to mention its users). The man is reading a copy of 1984 on his Motorola tablet. The romance angle mimics that between Winston and Julia in the Ministry of Truth. Of course the ad doesn’t show what happens to Winston and Julia at the end of the book, but the idea of breaking out of the ordinary and accepted has a certain appeal. Also, the fact that the defiant couple look like a couple of standard issue Apple users helps to further the effectiveness of the ad. I love it when an ad can tell a compelling story, and Motorola spent their $6 million to tell a great story.
There is much to appreciate in the ad, many angles from which to mock Apple and things like Apple. And this is one of my favorite. The famous and hilarious website Stuff White People Like chronicles just these sort of mock defiant postures and preferences adopted by the (mostly) white, (mostly) upper middle class who imagine they are exerting individuality in becoming exactly like one another. Indeed, the subtitle to SWPL’s first print book is, “Your Guide to the Unique Tastes of Millions.”
Which couldn’t really say it better. At this point can you really imagine yourself to be more counter cultural for buying a Mac instead of a PC? An iPad instead of a Kindle or the Motorola thingy? Well, in a sense, yes. This is exactly the thrust of Apple’s marketing. Buy our computer because you are unique, artistic, visionary, and nothing says that like owning our computer products. And when you see someone else with the same white laptop (preferably in a coffee shop brewing “free trade” coffee) you can share a knowing nod, you are after all fellow revolutionaries in the war to bring down the madness of corporate excess from companies like Microsoft, not to mention so very creative. And it is brilliant advertising. Everyone wants to feel this way. And if the barrier to entry is spending a little more on a laptop you need anyway, why not make the jump? Heck, I just ruined my laptop and am looking for ways to justify buying a Mac. I am everything I am railing against. But I can appreciate a joke directed at me and people like me, and on this score Motorola had a zinger the other night.
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