Persona Pugilism

Is it me or does the marketing war between Apple and Microsoft give you high school flashbacks? I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when advertising giant TBWA came up with the Mac and PC characters for Apple’s “Get a Mac” ad campaign.

In case you’ve been off the grid for a few years, let me sum it up for you:

Apple: “We are cool. You are lame.”

Microsoft: “Shut up! We’re cool too.”

And for those of you who need a field-guide style refresher to high school cliques, I refer you to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for a quick rundown (skip ahead to about 55 seconds into the clip).

Apple’s ads have been running long enough that I’d more or less forgotten about them. But now that Microsoft is fighting back, it’s put the Mac vs. PC war in a whole new light. Microsoft has picked up the gauntlet and breathed new life into this particular front of the culture war.

Revenge of the Nerds

I think my interest in the Mac vs. PC debate has been re-ignited because of personas. As a copywriter, I’m always interested in the personas that our strategic team develops. Used intelligently, personas can help create an engaging user experience and significantly higher conversion rates.

I write a lot of e-mail invite copy, so I’m typically poring over personas and trying to get in the heads of a given audience. This got me wondering: What personas did Apple have in mind when they cooked up the Mac and PC characters?

For certain, these personas were based on a sort of tribal/emotional appeal. The Mac ads really don’t trade, say, on a MacBook Pro’s ability to process graphics faster than your typical Dell laptop. The appeal of Justin Long’s Mac character is that he’s a sort of hipster Everyman. He just wants his stuff to work while he’s editing photos, surfing the Web, and customizing his Myspace page. On the other hand, the persona that supports John Hodgman’s PC character must include the following adjectives: harried, out-of-touch, nerdy.

The irony here is that the actors play against their cultural cache—John Hodgman is the witty humorist frequently featured on the uber-hip Daily Show with John Stewart. Justin Long is the here-today-gone-tomorrow actor from Dodgeball and, um, the Mac ads.

This is why the Mac and Microsoft ads are so intriguing—they are pure marketing. No mention of technical specifications or language about processing speeds, RAM, or number of FireWire ports. These advertising campaigns are coming right after your sense of cultural self-worth: Are you hip or are you a dork?

This is probably a can of worms for another post, but I think the Mac ads got it wrong from the start. But I am fascinated by the popularity and longevity of the “Get a Mac” campaign. The ads are personas used to perfection and now that Microsoft’s gearing up for battle, it should make for an interesting 2009 in the battle for our computing hearts and minds.