The Empire Strikes Back - PC's 2009 Ad Campaign

What do you do if a competitor keeps insulting you in their ads? Insult back, meowww...!? No, we gotta do it in style and PC has an answer: Discredit your competitor.

With the help of ad agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab and direction of Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. began a series of humorous PC-attacking commercials in 2006, featuring a casually dressed young man representing Mac, and a frustrated-looking stereotyped chubby mid-aged middle management type portraying PC. Each of these commercial tells PC users what problems they could have avoided if they had a Mac, hoping to encourage brand switch. The commercials are usually funny, light-weighted and stylish with minimalist white background, which make them highly recognizable and memorable; and have also received pretty good acclaims from their viewers even though some consider them mean-spirited.



Now after three years of bombarding PC, die-hard PC users have began to feel irritated each time they see these Mac vs. PC commercials. Many PC users, including myself, do not want a Mac, will not spend $1,000 for a slow laptop, and we are tired being reminded of the problems we are quite aware of while watching our favorite shows!

With great patience, PC waited for this tipping point when PC users became fed up with these Mac vs. PC commercials, then it launched a brilliant counter-attack. With all the excellent track records of success of Apple’s commercials (the campaign received the Grand Effie Award in 2007), does PC need to come up with something even smarter or more stylish? Perhaps, and that’s the usual practice; but it not only will take a lot of dollars and thinkings to launch a proper attack-back strategy like that, it could also get really ugly between Mac and PC if such campaign takes place. That's not good for either company's brand image. Instead, PC asserts itself by showing what it really is through a series of “I am a PC and I am x years old” commercials, which stylishly discredit Apple’s portraits of PC.



What are the results? Not only PC has successfully communicated their core-competencies against Mac, Apple now has to wait for a proper time to launch a new campaign, and spend time and millions of dollars to come up with a brand new communication strategy because these discredited commercials would now look foolish. Way to go, PC!