"Get a Mac" Ads
"Hello, I'm a Mac." "And I'm a PC." Two guys, a white void, thirty seconds of the suit losing to the hoodie. Apple's 2006–2009 campaign turned an operating-system rivalry into the most quotable sitcom on television — and made John Hodgman's crashing, virus-riddled PC the most lovable loser of the decade.
The "Get a Mac" campaign was created for Apple by its ad agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab and ran from 2006 to 2009, with Steve Jobs introducing it at a shareholders' meeting the week before launch. The format never changed: against a plain white background, Justin Long's casual, laid-back Mac and John Hodgman's suit-and-tie PC introduce themselves, act out a thirty-second vignette — PC crashing, catching viruses, drowning in error messages while Mac shrugs — and the spot closes on a Mac with its logo onscreen, scored by Mark Mothersbaugh's little instrumental "Having Trouble Sneezing." A successor to Apple's 2002 "Switch" ads, the campaign wasn't aimed at PC diehards but at "swing" buyers who had simply never considered a Mac.
It worked almost immediately. Apple, coming off softer sales in 2005–06, saw Mac sales jump by 200,000 in the campaign's first month, announced 1.3 million Macs sold by the end of July 2006, and finished its fiscal year that September up 39 percent. The campaign went international with localized casts — Mitchell and Webb played the pair in the UK, comedy duo Rahmens in Japan — and later spots piled on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Not everyone was charmed; Slate called the ads "mean spirited," asking whether smug superiority was really a brand strategy, and PC Magazine's editor-in-chief grumbled that a Mac is, technically, also a PC.
The surest proof it landed: Microsoft answered. In late 2008 the "I'm a PC" campaign pushed back, featuring Microsoft employee Sean Siler as a deliberate Hodgman look-alike, and real PC users proudly claiming the label. By the time Apple retired the characters in 2009, "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC" had become permanent pop-culture shorthand for the whole platform war — a run of tiny episodes of the gentlest, most effective trash talk in advertising history.
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