Irrelevant Inside ⇥ wormsandviruses.com

I do not have any strong feelings about the new Intel ads featuring Justin Long; I don’t really have any feelings about them at all. They’re just kind of there, out in the ether, badly composited and referencing a fifteen year old campaign.

But I couldn’t quite understand why they seemed incomplete until I read this excellent piece from Jack Wellborn:

Make fun of Apple or not, the goal of this campaign should have been “a laptop without Intel is like a burger without Heinz”. Instead, Intel commoditized itself by creating an ad campaign that highlights all of the benefits of PC laptops regardless of what’s inside of them.

The original Mac vs. PC ads worked before and after the Mac transitioned to Intel because they almost exclusively referenced software differences. In fact, that was the more-or-less the point of the campaign: the guts of the computer may be similar, but their capabilities are worlds apart because of their software.

The funny thing about these Intel ads is that they could work just as well for PC makers that use AMD or ARM processors.