By Irina Skaya
There
has always been a constant debate between McDonalds vs. Burger King, Porsche vs. BMW, and now Mac vs. PC. I use both—I have a Macbook at home and I work on a Windows Vista machine at work. Although I use them for different purposes (Mac when I am feeling creative), I like both for different reasons. However, I really love Apple ads for their creative! A recent online video ad produced by TBWA/Media Arts is especially intriguing—it takes a unique approach by telling users NOT to click on the ad. It’s sort of like reverse psychology that a parent uses to get their teenage child to listen to him/her.
This recent article reported in AdAge this week shows an ad that tells the user if he/she clicks on it, they will receive an electric shock. AdAge says that this may be the only way in the world to get more than 2.5% of viewers to click on an ad. Will this work? It will definitely arouse some curiosity, but chances are if the user is a loyal PC customer, he/she would not click on it regardless. It’s definitely creative, but I am not sure if it will help generate market share for Apple, but cheaper products might.
I have never used an Apple but it seems everyone I know who has one is ardent in their loyalty - so I have to believe there's something to it.
That said, I am very happy with PC's. We build software solutions for the ad industry and everything we create is done with PC's. Quite frankly, very few of our prospects even use Macs.
While I have to believe creative pursuits might be better handled on Macs, there are plenty of opportunities to be creative working with numbers in this business on PC's.
Lotus 123 came along in 1983 and its potential for the numbers areas in this business quickly became apparent. And since that time it and competitors evolved and the result in power and performance is truly extraordinary.
That said, despite the fact that almost everyone in the numbers end of the ad industry has Microsoft Office on their desktops, there is extraordinary untapped potential to use this software to improve processes and readily turn month-long repetitive chores into minute-long tasks that allow one to get up and get a cup of coffee and return to a finished product - 100% free of error, vastly more comprehensive than the month-long version and usually far more navigable.
The trick is to re-engineer in a way that turns arduous number crunching time into analysis time. Too often, what passes for analysis is simply number crunching. So much time and effort is taken by the number crunching that the analysis is almost an afterthought.
I'm not sure whether Apple would allow all this to happen. But I know PC's do.
Posted by: John | May 23, 2009 at 12:22 PM