Apple's New Ads Ridicule Microsoft's New Ads

Metafiction (pronounced: meh-tah-fik-shun); noun; fiction which refers to or takes as its subject fictional writing and its conventions. -- Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

"Metamarketing" may not exist in Merriam-Webster's files, but for a visual definition, all one has to do is check out the latest Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) ads that are all about -- the latest Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) ads.

If you're a fan of the "I'm a PC, and I'm a Mac" ads featuring actor/writer John Hodgman as the Microsoft whipping boy and actor Justin Long as the epitome of Apple coolness, then you may have been waiting for this latest shot across Microsoft's bow from Steve Jobs ever since the world's largest software company pulled its expensive Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercials out of network rotation.

Counting Beans

In one of the 30-second ads, "Bean Counter," Hodgman sits at a desk counting out stacks of money into two piles; one for Windows Vista advertising, one for "fixing Vista." The ad pile is huge and the other pile is much smaller, prompting Long's character to ask if all that money is really going to help. Hodgman thinks about it for a second, then says, "you're right," and promptly sweeps the smaller pile into the bigger marketing pile.

The other new Apple ad, "The V Word," presents Hodgman with a buzzer that he employs whenever Long says the word, "Vista."

For some observers of all things technology, this style of marketing makes all those nasty political ads now cluttering up TV screens look like a PBS pledge drive.

Window of Marketing Opportunity

In fact, the technology press and blogosphere are painting this latest "Mac vs. PC" ad battle as a little too inside-Silicon-Valley for the average consumer who is likely to encounter these commercials during NFL football or in-between all the lead-footed tangos on "Dancing With The Stars." A check of the headlines on Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) News tells the story -- like a good headline should -- and also reveals biases: "Apple Shoots Spitballs Back at Microsoft;" "Apple Goes McCain on Microsoft" (one of two McCain headline mentions), "Apple Jokes Getting Old: Pointless Ads Mock Microsoft's Vista," "Apple Gets Snooty With Anti-Vista Ads."

The Apple commercials target the millions Microsoft has spread out among its two recent ad campaigns, the first featuring Seinfeld and Gates wandering America in spots that were criticized for their quirky humor, then a more traditional round of fast-paced commercials with average Windows users, along with some celebrities, touting "I'm a PC." This latest campaign even features a semi-salute to the Apple ads with a Hodgman lookalike saying, "I'm a PC and I've been made into a stereotype."

Microsoft deserves some blame for giving Apple an opening it can't ignore, software marketing/sales consultant Merrill "Rick" Chapman, author of the Softletter tech marketing newsletter and the book "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters," told MacNewsWorld.

"That's Apple having fun at Microsoft's expense," Chapman said. "But the reality is that Vista is the most catastrophic marketing disaster that Microsoft has ever done. The only thing that's comparable is a product called "Access" -- not the database, but a communications program they launched in the 1980s. It was so bad they pulled it off the market almost immediately.

"Vista was a mismarketed product. They put out too many versions of it so people didn't know what to buy. They mispriced it, pushing past historical pricing boundaries. There was no strong identity around Vista. Why would you buy it, what would you do with it?"

Time for a Cease-Fire?

Does it really serve Apple's purposes to pile on Microsoft for Vista, and to do it in a way that might indeed be a little too inside-baseball for the average consumer? It's simply the latest chapter in Apple's long marketing (Mac)book that began with the famous "1984" ad, directed by a young Ridley Scott, that took on the computer industry leader at the time, IBM (NYSE: IBM), Chapman says.

Both the latest Apple and Microsoft campaigns are branding ads, Chapman said. "What you're selling is not any product or service; what you're selling is a concept that rides along the consciousness of the brain in the person that's watching them."

The new Apple ads "are fun, they're hurting Microsoft, hurting its image, but how much do they help Apple? They help in that they make Apple cool as a lifestyle choice, as a consumer electronics company. In terms of being a serious player in business computing, they never will be until the fundamentals of the business change. And that might be taking place, as Software as a Service takes off and people stop thinking about running applications on the desktop and start running them off the cloud."

In the meantime, Chapman noted that recent comments from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer have started pointing consumers toward Windows 7, the next operating system update. Chapman says Ballmer's company has a lot of homework until then in the form of lessons from Vista's marketing plan. And no amount of "I'm a PC ads" are going to help.

"I get these intangibles that ride along with those ads: I'm cool, I'm better-looking, whatever," Chapman said. "The problem from Microsoft's standpoint is that until Vista goes away, their efforts are crippled."