There has been a curious flip-flop lately in advertising from a certain group of companies - particularly Apple and Intel.
Now that Apple has their new Power Mac G5 machines, backed by IBM's PowerPC 970 processor, their print ad campaign has gone rather technical. Apple's ads feature wafers of PPC 970 chips and a picture of IBM's chip processing plant, and the accompanying text (of which there is a lot for an Apple ad) waxes on and on about the technical merits of the G5 chip and system, of the merits of 64 bit computing, etc.
Now that sounds rather like an Intel ad campaign (at least - the Intel ad campaigns that I remember)
In the September issue of Wallpaper, a large eye candy magazine from the UK focusing on travel, design, fashion, etc, there lies a multi page Intel ad focusing on Centrino. The Intel ad is alarmingly fashionable. The ads are sparsely laid out, with a large picture and a good degree of white space which features a few (very few) lines of text in a nice serif font. The people in the ad look like they're out of a Paul Smith or Gucci ad. And of course, they're all sporting slender metallic laptops.
Curiously, it's much more high fashion in its design than many of the traditionally fashionable Apple ads (which are more GAP like).
The other day, I was discussing this strange turn of advertising with a friend. As I was talking about the Centrino ads, I realized that Centrino is really a direct competition with Apple's notebook series. Since the introduction of the first iBook and Airport (Apple's 802.11 system, and the first commercial 802.11 implementation to get noticed), it's been known that when you get an Apple Laptop, you get wireless effectively built in. You get decent battery life. Effectively, you get a lot in a small space. Centrino looks like it's trying to become a brand image for "Wintel" laptops that connotes a similar system/confidence. I think that Apple, Sony, and Toshiba have really set the style for what people want from a notebook computer, and Apple's brand is strong enough that people looking for wireless and fashionability that they've tended to win out in purchasing decisions lately (Apple has gained 2% market share in Notebooks in the second quarter). I don't know if Intel came up with the Centrino brand, or if various PC vendors pressured Intel to come up with something to make all their notebooks seem, at least partially, "Apple Compatible." But in any case, it's a strange turn of events.
Apparently, Microsoft too is supposed to be chasing after more fashionable advertising this fall. So with Intel and Microsoft chasing the fashionable market, is Apple going to turn around and promote the technical advantages of their products? We'll have to see how the ad campaigns for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) turn out. I imagine that Apple's consumer hardware will continue to be simple and elegant - Apple has such a strong brand image here, made even stronger by the success of the iPod (see this Daring Fireball article about why there's still no real competition to the iPod, no matter what Dell or the press may think for more details). As Apple's technical base continues to get stronger, helped by new hardware (G5) and software (Panther, Panther Server), look for them to extol these virtues while the rest of the crowd tries to go after the fashionable brand area that Apple is starting to dominate.