Mac Web Ads

*** The below post has been transferred without comments from another blog which was hosted on Ning. The post has been backdated to its original publishing date ***

The Mac ads on various websites that use both the header location and the side rectangle, I must say, are pretty clever when I first saw them. Adverbox has a screen clip of the of the first ones to come out. Im surprised I haven’t seen more companies use this technique yet.

Also along the same lines, Appleinsider has a new story on Microsoft’s $300 million ad campaign that is supposedly taking on the ‘Im a PC, Im a Mac’ ads. If you’ve seen the first Microsoft ad with Jerry Seinfeld, it was a miserable failure. It features Seinfeld and Bill Gates in a store buying shoes and makes no mention of Windows or PC’s and leaves the viewer asking, ‘What the heck was that about?” If the campaign was supposed to be a series of commercials that built on each other I’d understand, but the fact that they have pulled them and opted for the much better ‘Im a PC’ commercials tells me that the commercials were supposed to be stand alone. Someone in the ad agency probably thought ‘Jerry Seinfeld is funny and should do no wrong if we give him $ and creative control’. Curious that the Seinfeld/Gates commercial even made it on air and didn’t get scratched by someone who had the guts to question it. Viral videos and low-key, humorous videos are hard to do correctly and takes the right person to do it. 30 or 60 seconds is not a lot of time to both tell a story, make it funny and/or make a point, and get your point across about your product.