iMedia Connection Blog

The annual glut of overpriced Super Bowl advertising has come and gone, and as a digital marketer, I am required by my guild – The Guild of Resentful Digital Marketers – to pen a cranky blog post about how those ad dollars could have been better spent online. But in flagrant defiance of guild rules, I will instead argue that one of those ads was precisely the right investment for the brand: Motorola’s gleefully Apple-bashing “Empower the People” ad.
Amidst a flock of ads full of hollow chest-beating, Motorola’s ad, starring its soon-to-be-released Xoom tablet, was a barbaric yawp over the rooftops of Apple fanboys across the land. As most readers must already know, it made sport of Apple’s iconic “1984” ad, which portrayed PC users as trapped in dystopian conformity. Motorola’s ad suggests that Apple has now created a dystopia of its own, with slavish iPad users glumly poring over their Flashless screens while those crappy white Apple headphones bleat in their ears.
Mere hours after the ad’s airing, the blogosphere is already brimming with posts decrying the absurdity of Motorola’s attempt to hoist Apple by its own petard. The decriers rightly point out that Motorola and Google are not exactly... Read more