Better at Life Stuff

Abstract

Apple's "Get a Mac" advertising campaign defines for its audience the dichotomy between the casual, confident, creative Mac user and the formal, frustrated, fun-deprived PC user through a series of comical television spots featuring human representations of each technology. The company has been largely applauded over the years for their creative, innovative, and thought-provoking marketing, and "Get a Mac," winner of the American Marketing Association's 2007 Grand Effie award, fits nicely with Apple's tradition of infusing cultural ideology into their ads. Utilizing the methods of close reading and ideological criticism, this study considers the North American "Get a Mac" television campaign as a popular culture text with embedded implications about consumption, identity, and class. The text reveals a number of thematic dichotomies that obscure meaningful issues of difference and class while promoting the spectacle of consumption and the myth of self-actualization through commodities.

Smart Assistants for Smart Living: Ideology and Mythology in AI-Powered Smart Speaker Advertising

“…Shields (2001) makes a similar argument about Apple computer consumers. This is furthered by Livingstone (2011), where he maintains that Apple has created experiences of associations and meaning-making in their advertising.…”

“…This study engages in an analysis of advertising as a powerful persuasive marketing tool that helps advertisers make new products and technology attractive to consumers by showing them the many ways in which they can use the product. It also helps in making the products and services meaningful to consumers by using emotions, ideology, mythology, identity markers, and cultural and ritualistic symbols leading to their wide-scale adoption and use (Campbell & LaPastina, 2008; Lehdonvirta, 2010; Livingstone, 2011). Thus, a close reading of advertising of smart speakers can be useful in revealing how human desires and “wants” are being converted into “needs” through corporate efforts, how social and cultural realities and myths are produced and reproduced by marketers, and the implications these have for collective identities, relationships, culture, and consumption.…”