The “Get a Mac” television advertising campaign

In 2005, Apple’s Mac sales were decreasing, and the company set out to change that with a brand-new ad campaign, titled Get a Mac. Not only was this campaign widely perceived as a success, but 11 years after the campaign finished, it is still recognisable to a lot of people.

The Get a Mac advertisements follow a standard template. They open to a minimalist all-white background, and a man dressed in casual clothes introduces himself as an Apple Macintosh computer (“Hello, I’m a Mac.”), while a man in a more formal suit-and-tie combination introduces himself as a Microsoft Windows personal computer (“And I’m a PC.”).

The two then act out a brief vignette, in which the capabilities and attributes of Mac and PC are compared, with PC—characterized as formal and somewhat polite, though uninteresting and overly concerned with work—often being frustrated by the more laid-back Mac’s abilities. The earlier commercials in the campaign involved a general comparison of the two computers, whereas the later ones mainly concerned Windows Vista and Windows 7.

In May of 2006, the very first batch of commercials for the Get a Mac campaign were released, and they were pretty different from Apple’s marketing strategy up to this point. A lot of Apple’s previous campaign’s focused on how Apple was special, different, trailblazers, and while those are still advertising messages that Apple uses to this day, the Get a Mac campaign humanized the product the Mac computer — and the company itself.