I'm A PC

With all the competition between Mac and PC it's pretty interesting how many new features each computer has. I love the Apple commercials with Mac and PC but I recently saw a PC commercial that was a type of response to Apple's commercials. The opening of the commercial had a guy dressed up like PC his brown jacket, glasses, thinning hair, and slumped posture. I think they wanted people to think this was an Apple commercial. I thought it at first until the PC character opens his mouth and says, "I'm a PC and I'm not alone." The commercial goes through a montage of PC users from African schools to European fashion designers. It shows people from different walks of life saying "I am PC."

I thought it was creatively done but I wondered why they chose to execute their idea the way they did. I think they wanted to directly respond to Apple first of all, by alluding to their commercials in the beginning. They took the idea that Apple had about their computers being personal companions and easy to use and said, "Hey! We do that too!" They wanted the public to know that PC/Windows can work well for the office and media. They wanted to break away from the idea that they are only good for documents and data. I have seen some pretty awesome graphic media technology developed by Windows. I enjoyed seeing the different PC users from different backgrounds. They had people who used PCs in offices and people who used PCs to create and show video. They covered a wide range of uses which helped explain and show their audiences how PCs can be just as effective.

This could be a challenging lesson to take into a classroom. I think I would want to talk to the students about company battles through commercials. I would definitely have to do some outside research but I would try and find all kinds of ads for various products and their rival company's response ads. I would use Apple and Windows as and example. I would show a couple Apple commercials and then show Windows' response commercials. I would talk to the students about how each commercial is portraying the rival's product and why they thought the companies chose to advertise that way. We would analyze the commercials as a class and discuss the effective and ineffective aspects of each. After the discussion I would ask the class which ad is more persuasive and effective in selling the product. I would then split the class into groups and have half the groups create an advertisement (paper, video, radio) on one product and have the other groups create an ad on the rival's product (or each group could pick a unique product to advertise). I think this could be a fun lesson that could have creative and interesting outcomes.