The Ad Wars

I love a good ad.  Making ads are part of my income stream.  A smaller part than they used to be, but part nonetheless.  Finally, after years of enduring the buzz about the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” spots by Mac, Microsoft is finally striking back with something clever and, I think, effective. 

Justin Long plays the Mac.  He’s an actor who used to be best known for films including Accepted and Dodgeball and the TV show Ed until he was dumped by Drew Barrymore.  And John Kellog Hodgman, a real-life Mac user, plays the PC.  He’s a humour writer and an excellent deadpan performer.

Now Microsoft is using “I’m a PC” as a positive, instead of the negative way it’s portrayed in the spots, which focus more heavily on the PC’s shortcomings than anything else.

A gaggle of famous and not so famous faces, starting with Bill Gates, look into the camera and proudly announce, I’m a PC.  It’s edited beautifully and it’s very effective. 

Of course, this comes on the heels of a disastrously received, humongously expensive and weird little campaign starring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. They were mini-movies that made little or no sense!  Jerry helping Bill shoe shop? The two of them bunking with a regular family? It was probably fun for them but not as interesting for the rest of us.

Mac will probably never surpass Microsoft as the home computer of choice, although if more people were Mac based I might be tempted to go back to it.  I was Mac until it became too annoying to be on one platform, trying to communicate to another and failing a lot of the time. Things have changed since then but I’m skittish to go back to that frustrating time.  But as far as the ad wars go, Mac had me at Hello. Until the new Microsoft ads hit the air, anyway.