Alan Gutierrez

Microsoft has released a new advertisement, after the Jerry Sienfeld and Bill Gates advertisements (Shoe Circus, A Family Affair), which had the look and feel of sitcom spun-off of the Seinfeld TV Show of yesteryear. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Jerry and Bill go from one ordinary domestic setting to the next, brining their own brand (Jerry’s brand) of humor with them. One episode even had an entire sitcom family.

These were generally referred to as the commercials about nothing.

Now the advertising has made a preposterous leap to an incredibly defensive ad campaign.

The ad is passive-aggressive with a chilly tone of righteous indignation. I recalls the haughty politically correct types that I’d encounter in Ann Arbor. You might be talking about the Atlanta Braves when someone at the table says, “Well, my great grandfather was half Chippewa Native-American,” and glowers at you. Everyone stops talking about baseball and starts talking about nothing.

They start with a John Hodgeman look alike saying, “I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype.” Then they run through a litany of people who say that they are a PC, but they are not hip, they wear glasses, they study genes, they are not human doings but human beings, and they are all PCs.

Immediately, I recalled Principal Blackman’s You’re A Racist educational film from Strangers With Candy, the comedy that parodied the after school specials that are so familiar to me as a television weened child of the 80’s. (The video is available. Please click play.)

The ad campaign fails for me because of this overlay. More after the jump.

The advertisement puts forward a straw man accusation, that Apple has made a stereotype of a group of people. It then beats the straw man to dust with a hackneyed device, this litany of people proudly laying claim to their cultural identity, showing that they can shatter your stereotype with the diversity of their accomplishment.

Except that in the Mac ads John Hodgeman represents an actual PC computer, not a person who uses the computer. He is not a stereotype. He is an archetype.

He is beige, stuffy, fickle and temperamental. The “Hello, I’m a Mac” ads compare products, with two actors who personify the two products. The products are complicated, they come in many shapes and sizes, they go through short life cycles. This simple abstraction, these two actors portraying the archetypal Mac and PC, is an exceedingly clever way to communicate the nature of a product that does not stand still.

An honest complaint about political correctness is that it is used to stifle the conversation. When a person who is not really offended, but could be offended, takes offense, by a person who means no offense and will gladly find a better way to phrase something so that it is not offensive, they are burdening the other person with a tiptoe through a minefield of unintended injuries. The overhead of a conversation with someone who constantly interrupts you with “or she” when you use “he” as a collective, makes a conversation not worth having.

As such, politically correct has become a shorthand for saying that offense taken is insincere and overwrought. Bill Maher chose Politically Incorrect for the name of his talk show to convey the message that the show will be frank and sincere.

This is not to say that all offense is imagined. This is not to say that all you have to do is feign ignorance that you’re words are insulting and you’ll not be held to account. If you are ignorant of the insults you inflict, you are likely a bigot, but most certainly an oaf.

It is to say that it is amazing that Microsoft would make defense of the Personal Computer by arguing that the Mac has not been Politically Correct. That they would make this ham fisted argument that the “Hello, I’m a Mac” ads demean anyone, let alone the very people with whom those ads have been so successful, people who own PCs. Those ads are meant to convince PC owners to switch to Mac.

Those ads speak truth to PC owners. PC owners hear the truth and switch.

Imagine if you will, an advertisment, with Ronald Mc Donald, in a darkened studio with the light on his face, becauswhe he wants to have a very serious conversation. “The Burger King has been saying that the Whopper is better than the Big Mac.” Ronald now makes a turn to camera three. “This is not only an insult to McDonalds. This is an insult to billions and billions served.”

Except that Microsoft is not saying, you’re insulting our customers. It’s saying our customers are PCs. You’ve insulted PCs. PCs, for the purposes of this advertisement, are an ethnic group that is the victim of stereotyping.

I’m wondering if the advertisers knew that this advertisement would draw on the imprints of the after school specials when putting forward this message? That this righteous indignation over stereotyping PCs would tap into the sincere revulsion we have at stereotypes, which are “a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment?” Or did someone in the cultural anthropology department say it out loud, “PC and Mac are like two different ethnic groups,” and the ideas flowed from there?

In this, our election season, a season of meaningless fabricated demographics, with all it’s feigned indignations, and responses to statements once they’ve been taken completely out of context, you’d think that Microsoft would find something other than an appeal to tribalism, a populist denunciation of the elites. It might be a strategy to open up a cultural rift between PC and Mac users and exploit that rift with the political tactics we’ve come to loathe.

The advertisers might be outsiders who might really believe that people are that passionate about their computer vendors. They aren’t. From what those to guys in the Mac ads say, people switch all the time.