Bite Out of the Apple

After more than two decades of getting drummed by the Apple marketing department, the marketing executives at Microsoft may have finally delivered their first real blow to the once-revolutionary Apple creative team.

In what’s arguably its first really effective, entertaining, humorous and human advertising campaign, Microsoft’s commercials that play off of Apple’s Mac Guy versus PC Guy (“I’m a PC and I’m not a total stereotype of a dweeb”) actually succeed in turning Apple’s message upside down by taking what was created as negative and making it a complete positive. Funny thing is: it was actually Apple’s missteps that set up the punch from Microsoft in the first place.

Apple apparently forgot that when it comes to straight man/funny man combinations, people tend to like the funny man. Whether it’s Abbott & Costello, Bugs Bunny & Elmer Fudd or Gilligan & Skipper, we like the characters who make us laugh. Yet the Apple copywriters gave all the jokes, all the costumes and all the gimmicks to the PC Guy, leaving the Mac Guy standing there with a self-righteous and judgmental smug on his face time after time.

The PC Guys has sat on the throne, dressed like the King from Burger King; peeped his head from a pizza box, trying to lure college student; been ducked taped; bloated; blown up; in a wheel chair; on a yoga mat; shaven; and decked out like a spy. The Mac Guy just stands there looking “cool” and completely boring.

Even consider the initial casting. We can see the actor who plays the PC Guy on stage doing stand up and sometimes appearing on the Jon Stewart Show. The claim to fame for the actor playing Mac Guy is his role as the lovable loser opposite Lindsay Lohan in Herbie Fully Loaded.

Which personality would you rather be associated with as a consumer?

Maybe it’s not so surprising (and somehow related) when we hear the latest Changewave figures suggesting that Apple sales are cooling off, after grabbing some significant steam since the launch of the iPod. In the survey, the percentage of technology consumers who plan to buy a Mac in the next 90 days had dropped from 34% in August to 29% in September, the biggest such decline in more than two years.

Score one for Microsoft marketing.