Not "why have they dropped it?" but "why is this news?".
It's rare for any advertising campaign to run for more than a few months these days. Once upon a time advertising that seemed to work could be used for decades, after all, Guinness is good for you. The advertising game has changed and corporations are suckers for it. They believe the marketing men who tell them they need a new campaign every few months and the marketing men have a vested (junket!) interest in telling the execs this.
So the real story is not that the campaign has come to an end, but that it lasted so long.
It worked. The proof that it worked was how much it got under Microsoft's skin. Microsoft's own "I'm a PC" adverts prove how well it worked. Had the original campaign not worked so well why would MS have felt the need to run their campaign? It's incredibly rare for a campaign to have generated so much interest in the mainstream media. It's unheard of for an ad IT campaign to manage this. All the sad little commentards using this discussion to further their pointless arguments about the superiority of one OS over another are missing the point. It was never the message of this campaign that was important, nor was it the product being advertised, it was the campaign itself that was clever.
MS could have run with the same campaign themselves had the advertising company come to them first. "I'm a PC and almost every software package you can buy will run on mew." "I'm a Mac and 95% of the software you can buy won't run on me." (No Mactards don't start flaming me, Wintards don't start agreeing - it's just an example.) But when MS and their fans did start doing it, it came over as desperate. Why couldn't they come up with an equally original campaign. Probably because original isn't something Microsoft excel at (see what I did there?).
I suspect that Apple probably intented the campaign to run for a few weeks or months, but the reaction that it got from MS and particularly from Windows fanbois convinced them to keep it going for much longer.
The only thing I hated about the whole campaign was the assumption that PC = Windows. Yeah, alright the vast majority of PCs run Windows, but it was yet another advertising campaign that furthered public ignorance.
Register
Why?
Not "why have they dropped it?" but "why is this news?".
It's rare for any advertising campaign to run for more than a few months these days. Once upon a time advertising that seemed to work could be used for decades, after all, Guinness is good for you. The advertising game has changed and corporations are suckers for it. They believe the marketing men who tell them they need a new campaign every few months and the marketing men have a vested (junket!) interest in telling the execs this.
So the real story is not that the campaign has come to an end, but that it lasted so long.
It worked. The proof that it worked was how much it got under Microsoft's skin. Microsoft's own "I'm a PC" adverts prove how well it worked. Had the original campaign not worked so well why would MS have felt the need to run their campaign? It's incredibly rare for a campaign to have generated so much interest in the mainstream media. It's unheard of for an ad IT campaign to manage this. All the sad little commentards using this discussion to further their pointless arguments about the superiority of one OS over another are missing the point. It was never the message of this campaign that was important, nor was it the product being advertised, it was the campaign itself that was clever.
MS could have run with the same campaign themselves had the advertising company come to them first. "I'm a PC and almost every software package you can buy will run on mew." "I'm a Mac and 95% of the software you can buy won't run on me." (No Mactards don't start flaming me, Wintards don't start agreeing - it's just an example.) But when MS and their fans did start doing it, it came over as desperate. Why couldn't they come up with an equally original campaign. Probably because original isn't something Microsoft excel at (see what I did there?).
I suspect that Apple probably intented the campaign to run for a few weeks or months, but the reaction that it got from MS and particularly from Windows fanbois convinced them to keep it going for much longer.
The only thing I hated about the whole campaign was the assumption that PC = Windows. Yeah, alright the vast majority of PCs run Windows, but it was yet another advertising campaign that furthered public ignorance.