Excellence in Advertising
I realize that putting an Apple ad up here isn’t exactly the most original thing I can do, but the problem is, they’re just that good. TBWA\Chiat\Day really gets it. Think about what the ad is doing:
It’s telling you that Leopard is better than Vista.
Our product is better than theirs.
This isn’t novel in any way, but think about how something like this is usually done: Let’s say we’re selling joker brand. (“He’s been using Brand X, but with new joker brand, I get a laugh again, and again.”) The marketing or maybe the product people will probably want to throw in a comparison matrix that shows that joker brand clearly has more checkboxes than brand X in all of these feature rows, hence it’s better! Clearly that more features equals better approach is working for the Creative Zen which is fighting for that ~10% of the market not taken up by the iPod. The Zen is the nerd at the party that gives you a laundry list of reasons why he is right, while everyone is talking to the hot girl on the other side of the room.
Then there’s the blind taste test / consumer group approach: “In a blind taste test, people prefer our product 2-to-1 over the leading brand.” Then comes the authoritative variant, “Doctors and dentists prefer our brand 3-to-1.” Well alright, but how believable is this? The voice, whether it’s a literal voice in a television ad or a written voice in a print ad, is still talking at me and trying to convince me that joker brand is better. Most of the time these are well formulated logical arguments if you accept the premise.
This is a strictly business type approach. It has merit surely, and does work sometimes, but to me it sounds a lot like, “all my friends are doing it.” And we are conditioned to reject this logic. Either way, this doesn’t fit Apple. What has Apple tried to be ever since Steve Jobs took over and introduced the original iMac in 1998? They’ve tried to be fun, humble, playful, friendly. The consensus is that they’ve succeeded.
In this ad, towering above everything else is a very short and sweet quote from a highly respected source: the Wall Street Journal. Most companies would have just slapped the quote on their ad and flouted their superiority, or had the omnipresent voice read what they had accomplished, flashed the product, cue the features, cue the benefits, and there’s your ad. Apple turns the whole concept on its head. Instead you have the quote, in print, high above everything else, and very passive– it speaks for itself. Then you have the PC guy insisting it’s wrong and wanting to take it down, only then does the Apple guy say that he “thinks” that it’s true, but agreeing to help PC on his quest to fight what must surely be libel. The message is clear, but in my opinion the point isn’t being force fed. People tend to respond favorably to humor in life, whether it’s at a party, whether it’s in political candidates, or in advertising. Perfect.
My point here is to try interesting ways to get your message across. Challenge convention, and always consider what kind of voice you want your company to have, and make sure it permeates every communication you have with your customers, especially advertising. GoDaddy is another success story. Remember their racy and crazy Super Bowl ads? The company forged a reputation of being fun and maverick in what is possibly the dullest industry possible: domain name sales. They took it away from the incredibly dull and corporate Network Solutions, now Verisign, who clings to the notion that they were there first as GoDaddy is killing that segment of their business.
In short, “think different,” connect with your customers, understand them, and talk to them like you’d like someone to talk to you.
