Those Crazy Mac Ads: One Year Later

Posted by Kyle April 16th, 2007 at 06:23pm In Adverts

Almost a year ago, I posted a link to some nifty new Mac ads that I thought were pretty cool. At the time I actually thought they would have limited air time and would mostly be watched by people on the Internets actively seeking them out. Oh, Kyle From The Past, you were so naïve. Now those ads are everywhere. They show them silently on webpages I visit, begging me to “click for sound.” And I do. I click on them. And they’re on TV all the time. Sometimes I stop fast-forwarding the TiFaux to watch them.

Why do I watch these ads? It’s not the content. Pretty much all of the advertisements are based on incomplete or false information targeted towards people who don’t know how to use their computers, and from what I can tell, have never used a Mac. Take the recent “Computer Cart” ad. “PC” is sitting on a cart with other business-suit types. PC has some sort of cryptic error message and he has to go away to IT to get fixed. “Mac” claims not to know about cryptic error messages. Now I’m no operating system partisan. I think they’re both great, and I actually have both OS X and Windows installed on my PC. But anyone who has ever used a Mac has seen those wonderfully cryptic error messages like “Adobe Photoshop has unexpectedly quit.” Is there anything more cryptic than a complete lack of information? Yahoo has a nice analysis of the accuracy of the ads which comes out at 50%, although I’d put it even lower.

But true or not, they’re unusually funny and clever. They’re instantly recognizable when you’re scanning through on the TiFaux. And they have John Hodgman. He’s a nerd legend. He used to be a literary agent, and now he’s a correspondent on The Daily Show! They have a great format that allows for a large number of episodes. There’s no reason why it couldn’t go on for years. Really what we have is a 30 second sitcom broadcast between longer television programs. It’s not serialized, and the characters never learn or grow, but the same was true of Seinfeld. It’s not in danger of being turned into a pilot like the Geiko Cavemen (a punchline that barely merited two commercials, let alone a 30 minute sitcom) since it’s impossible for these anthropomorphic machines to exist outside of the white netherworld of the commercial. And that’s a good thing. Just imagine a show with the two of them sharing an apartment like the Odd Couple.