Intel shmintel

I don’t get the new Intel Core 2 Duo tv commercials, the ones featuring young beautiful people dancing around and multiplying themselves. Oh, I understand the metaphor – Intel Core 2 Duo allows you to run several applications at once, therefore you can “multiply” your efforts, effectively “cloning” yourself – but these tv spots don’t make me want to buy the product, and I think the the aim of advertising is to make me want to buy something.

By comparison the Mac tv spots DO make me want to buy their products. Mind you I’m EXTREMELY biased since I’ve been using Mac products since 1993, but that aside these spots cleverly illustrate the benefits of Mac over PC computers.

Both the Mac and the Intel commercials work very hard at exploiting a visual medium without resorting to the tedium of description. However the Mac spots succeed by presenting a 30 second one act comedic play, the moral of which is that Mac is the uncomplicated, uncompromising choice; whereas the Intel spots fail because they rely on interpretive dance to deliver a message about an advanced computer processor. Seriously, am I going to buy anything based on interpretive dance, other than interpretive dance lessons or perhaps ballet tickets? D-is-co-nn-ec-t.

In the end it’s about relating – if I can’t relate I won’t buy.