Apple has started a trend with their Get A Mac ads. They are 30–second clips that leave people thinking about the benefits of owning an Apple computer. The main reason that many of the ads are memorable is because of the humor used to portray the different features that Macs have. Of course, the jokes come at the expense of Windows PC’s.
To go along with Microsoft’s new Windows Live Hotmail there is a marketing campaign similar to Apple’s. They may not seem similar in terms of content, but the underlying tactics are remarkably similar. Microsoft is using four quick 30–second videos that each demonstrate just one feature of Windows Live Hotmail. If they tried to put too many features into each video the people watching would never remember them. Sounds a lot like Apple’s videos to me.
To watch the campaign yourself just go to NewLiveHotmail.com, or I have posted all four videos below for you to watch (the first one is my favorite):
Suspicious Male
Preview Pane
Drag and Drop
Hot Male
Those are pretty good. When’s Yahoo! gonna do something creative to show off their excellent mail beta?
Umm… I don’t see how these are related to the ‘Get A Mac’ ads… Apple’s ads show their superiority over another operating system/hardware by a direct approach at PC problems. They’re very funny, and almost always correct!
These ads just serve to show people the new features in WLHotmail, and not necessarily how they’re better than the competition, let alone directly attacking their competitors.
Good fun to watch though!
I’m pretty sure Ryan was meaning that they’re similar in the fact that they focus on only one issue at a time.
Yeah, I was implying that the ads focus on delivering just one feature so that the people watching the video don’t get confused as to what the point of watching the video is. For example, in one of the latest Get A Mac ads they focused on showing that there is only one version of the Mac OS X while Vista has several different versions. They didn’t try to throw in additional features because the people watching the ad wouldn’t remember them all.