Tim Tse's Blog

Companies are trying hard to penetrate through the barriers that lie between consumers and the product. Normally TV ads are good enough to promote the awareness of a product. But nowadays, companies often target daily computer users and would rather promote online than on TV. While everyone’s still discussing viral videos nowadays, I came across Beverly Chung’s blog post – “Bad Publicity – Is it really all that bad?” and I immediately thought of Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.

Uploaded on February 10, Rebecca Black’s Friday music video attracted over 87 million on YouTube as of now. What makes “Friday” so special is because it’s possibly the most disliked video, with over 1.7 million dislikes out of 2 million votes. While everyone’s criticizing on Rebecca Black’s vocal talent as well as the lyrics of the song, “Friday” undoubtedly became viral and started spreading on the Internet through social media, including Facebook and Twitter.

I believe (and hope) that the producers didn’t expect that much negative criticism on the song when they we’re producing it because if they planned to sabotage the whole thing, then it would be quite mean to Rebecca herself (a 13-year old girl who’s pursuing her dream in the music industry). Therefore, I can’t really judge if it’s ethical to “sabotage” a product itself just to make it viral or not.

While I was reading one my marketing classmate’s blog, one of her marketing blog posts immediately grabbed my attention. Titled “Apple’s ‘Us Vs. Them’ Approach“, Beverly clearly indicates Apple’s promotional strategy on their TV advertisements. Not only in the current decade, Apple has already engraved the idea of being “fun, new, and extraordinary” in their ad in 1984.What does 1984 remind you of? Other than the well-known novel about dictatorship and brain-washing, it’s also the launch date of the first Macintosh. Apple combined these 2 elements together and launched a TV ad that depicts a woman being in a crowd of brain-washed humans. This was to attempt to separate themselves from the bunch of competitors.

Another video ad that Apple created a few years ago (and you might still see it on TVs) is the one that it shows two men, one that looks more geeky, where the other one looks cooler. The geeky guy calls himself “PC”, and the cool dude calls himself “Mac”. As the ad progresses, the cool guy attracts a pretty young lady to his side whereas a not-so-attractive woman (man-in-disguise) sides with the geeky guy. This makes a clear distinction between the two.

What makes me find this ad not ethical is how Apple portraits PC as being the “geek”. Being one of the most (or not, the most) used technology on the planet, PCs are technically ahead of the game in terms of sales. Apple’s strategy in these TV ads is simply just trying to taint PCs image, and thus as a result showing how much better Apple machines are. This strategy, however, would not really work on individuals who are loyal to PCs. To me it just looks unethical and makes me dislike Apple even more. Apple should probably try another tactic instead of crippling its main competitor’s public image since it’d garner more hate from the public.