The latest Laptop Hunter TV spot from Microsoft is the very definition of a hard sell.
No, not because it barks at you to buy a PC or you'll miss out on the deal of the century (even though you will, you will), but because it goes after the fearless foot soldiers of the Apple army--artists.
Sheila is a filmmaker. She wants something with a fast processor and a big screen. She also wants something that will be able to cut video. And all this for less than $2,000.
I look at Sheila's face and I want to make a film with her. She has the eyes of one of those film editors whose only familiarity with daylight is when they stumble out of an editing suite to have a cigarette and suddenly realize dawn is breaking and it's Tuesday, not Sunday.
However, this is a commercial and she's a little too dressy. If she'd been wearing jeans with a thousand coffee stains, a Black Sabbath T-shirt covered in croissant crumbs, and fingernails bitten to the wrist, she would have delivered the authentic film-editing look.
Instead, Sheila looks like a mom who's just popped over to Starbucks for a chai, a maple scone, and a colorful mug for her kids before popping across the mall for a pedi and a neck massage.
As is customary in this campaign, the script-free script calls for the protagonist to dismiss a Mac. Sheila looks at us and tells us the only Mac in her budget has a mere 2GB. Not enough for all the footage she intends to shoot for her L.A. version of "Gone With the Wind"--provisionally entitled "Gone to Bikram Yoga."
She shrugs to dismiss the MacBook Pro, as if to say: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a RAM."
She swiftly chooses a Hewlett-Packard HDX 16t.
Yet, one can't help feel as if Sheila's essential niceness suggests Microsoft has become a little tired of the more robust style epitomized by the first two hunters, Lauren and Giampaolo.
Perhaps, despite the current worldwide charge toward saving money, people still want wit and charm to balance the dry drag of their daily lives.
Even artists are trying to make happy films these days.
In its new Mac attack that debuted to coincide with students who can afford Macs playing basketball, Microsoft wants to make something very, very clear: truly, madly beautiful people buy PCs.
People who are picky about their hairstyle, their T-shirts, their jeans. Oh, yes, and their ability to withstand brand messages.
"I don't want to pay for the brand," says Giampaolo, who may or may not have had a bit part in "Twilight." "I want to pay for the computer." That computer should have "portability, battery life, and power."
Giampaolo says he's "technically savvy," though his car (if it is his) seems a little like an old Atari on wheels. Maybe it's a retro thing.
Still, there is one thing very different about Giampaolo's attitude from that of Lauren, the first Laptop Hunter: there is no way he's going into an Apple store.
One can only speculate why. Perhaps it is something to do with the strong rumor that, in filming the Lauren ad, she never actually spoke to anyone in the Apple store. She seems to have been in and out in fewer seconds than it takes to answer a Craigslist ad.
Giampaolo does, however, find a MacBook in an all-encompassing computer store. He declares it "so-oooo sexy." But although she's pretty and she might be a great one-night stand, she's just not a good long-term lover. Is it because she's high-maintenance? Is it because she's flighty? No, she just isn't intellectual enough for Giampaolo.
Well, he's picky, he knows what he wants and, just like his cool jeans, he goes out and gets it. This is all entirely acceptable and understandable.
There is only one thing that nags at me, in that way that a loose seam on your jeans nags at your spare tire.
If Giampaolo were technically (or is it technologically?) savvy, he'd have known exactly what he wanted from the very beginning. There would have been no need to look at a MacBook, no need to look at keyboards that were too small for his very, very large hands.
He'd have just gone straight for the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion HDX.
That would have made for a pretty short ad, wouldn't it?
While Steve Wozniak was rushing to an Apple store to get some help, Lauren, a quintessential average female consumer, was heading there too--part of Microsoft's bold new attempt to show the "Apple tax" in action.
In the Microsoft TV spot that just assaulted me during the Pitt-Xavier game, Lauren tells us she has needs. She needs a laptop with "speed, comfortable keyboard and a 17-inch screen for under $1,000." The voiceover tells her that if she finds it (at the Apple store or elsewhere), she can keep it--for free.
And so we follow Lauren, her fetching green scarf, and her jolly, Oregon-esque joie de vivre on her quest.
She goes to an Apple store and exits with a face suggesting that the dermatologist has given her bad news. She can only get a 13-inch screen for her money. She declares that she would have to "double her budget" to get what she wants from Apple.
She then offers the entirely unscripted line: "I'm just not cool enough to be a Mac person."
Oh, Lauren, what is cool these days? Yanni? The Jonas Brothers? Jimmy Kimmel? Do any of them wear a green scarf?
You will feel a tickling sensation in several parts of your anatomy when you hear that Lauren succeeds in her quest for budget-conscious joy. She wanders into a place that looks remarkably like Best Buy, where the choirs are singing and the choices are plentiful. She settles on a Hewlett-Packard PC that fulfills all her wishes. It even offers to drive her home. Well, not quite.
The HP is such a bargain that she pays cash. Is it because she happens to have about $700 in her purse, as all average female consumers do? No, because a helpful producer hands her the money.
This is perhaps Microsoft's most aggressive declaration of an advertising war against the Mac in a long, long time. What fun that the company and its ad agency, Crispin, Porter and Bogusky, have chosen an overt price war.
It will be interesting to see just how many cash-unconscious Americans will be persuaded to accept their own lack of sidewalk credibility and venture toward the PC.
And it will be interesting whether someone might be a little upset over the clear implication that Macs cost twice as much as PCs. After all, last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggested that the Apple logo costs only $500.
And now, back to the other March Madness.
There is something vaguely timber-shivering about every new Apple announcement. Especially for those Isaac Newtons whose head didn't just absorb the apple's bump, but the whole fruit, core and all.
The latest and most exciting rumor is that Cupertino's finest will, in a beautifully timed nod at the fact that most people have very little cash and even less credit, launch an $800 laptop.
This might cause certain elements at Dell and HP to scuttle off to the nearest executive restroom. Although perhaps the most surprising thing is that they would be surprised.
Of course there are those who fear that Apple might suddenly debase its image by pandering to the masses. But just as Target got into design to raise its brand image above the mass of the masses, Mercedes decided to stoop (but not really) into the runaround arena, by getting into Smart cars, A-Class cars. These were products people liked and then appreciated, regardless of their price.
It's not about moving below or above your price point. It's about how you do it.
Appearing at a price point at which you've rarely been seen before (yes, there's Mac Mini, but I think we're talking laptops here) isn't going to suddenly devalue your brand. What is important is not that Apple might launch an $800 laptop, but whether the little thing will be cute.
Apple strokes people's feely bits like few other brands in the world.
And its brand has arguably never been stronger than it is today. No other laptop manufacturer has ever really successfully competed with Apple on design.
Please don't be cross with me, but it seems like every other laptop around looks like the portable equivalent of most General Motors' automobiles. Circa 1992.
So with no real threat at the core of its brand, Apple can tiptoe through its competitors' tulips and check out the undersoil.
I imagine an $800 Apple laptop may have fewer of those function thingies that the more refined devotee might enjoy. Perhaps not. But those who want to pay $800 for an Apple laptop may well be happy with a little less ringing and whistling. Many won't even hear the silence.
Especially given that most of them know that Apple products function in a simple, engaging and human way. That, plus looks, is the real definition of great design.
What is vital, though, to much of the target is Arm Candy Quality: what the new laptop will look like, how it will feel you're using it, and what it will be like to be seen with. Yes, that may sound frustrating for those who regard a laptop's capabilities as the tech equivalent of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
But if Apple gets the feely parts right (and who can imagine it won't?) then the laundry bills around Austin, Texas, and other centers of laptop manufacture might just rise quite considerably.
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