Get a Mac…
Get a Mac…
Get a Mac…
Get a Mac…
Get a Mac…
Get a Mac…
Advertising is often seen these days as annoying. From skipping ads on YouTube videos, walking away from the TV when the commercials run, or paying an app developer to remove ads from an app, we love to have ways to ignore advertising. Yet, we haven’t seen the ad industry come to a grinding halt — ads are still everywhere and constantly bombarded us with marketing tactics. Why? Plain and simple, advertising works.
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.
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.
The Get a Mac campaign was created for Apple by TBWA\Media Arts Lab, its company’s advertising agency, that ran from 2006 to 2009. The advertisements were shown in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
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.
The original American advertisements star actor Justin Long as the Mac, and author and humorist John Hodgman as the PC, and were directed by Phil Morrison.
The Get a Mac campaign is the successor to the Switch ads that were first broadcast in 2002. Both campaigns were filmed against a plain white background. Steve Jobs introduced the campaign during a shareholders meeting the week before the campaign started. The campaign also coincided with a change of signage and employee apparel at Apple retail stores detailing reasons to switch to Macs.
The Get a Mac campaign received the Grand Effie Award in 2007. The song in the commercial is called “Having Trouble Sneezing” composed by Mark Mothersbaugh.
