CNN Has A Mac Compact In Their New Commercial

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astro_rob's picture
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CNN Has A Mac Compact In Their New Commercial

This is CNN's 25 anniversary this year, and our friends there decided to throw together a montage showing how the world has changed in the past two and a half decades. One of the images is of a Compact Mac (sorry, didn't quite catch the variant) when they mentioned the Internet (perhaps it was about the time before the Internet... that's an aside however). Now, I'll grant you that Macintosh and the Internet go together like peanut butter and jelly. However, that's still not the point.
The point is this... the Mac's screen was dark with a glowing green prompt...

C:\Internet (something like this)

Amazing what you can do with special effects... but a DOS based Mac?!? Somehow I doubt it was Virtual PC (I own a copy)... besides, green screen.
I just want to know which genius at which ad firm created this commercial. Did they even power the Mac up? Madison Avenue is known for its savvy, but not necessarily its smarts.
(Probably the wrong place for this post... but hey, it is a 68k Mac).

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Madison Avenue chimes . . .

Hey,

Although there are few ad agencies actually on Madison Avenue these days (Apple's agency Chiat/Day is one of them but most of that work is done on the west coast so that the reality distortion field can be tapped), NYC ad agencies are 99% Macintosh in the creative studios. What you're responding to isn't a technical mistake as much as it is a political decision. The DOS/Mac is intended as the best of both worlds in that both platforms are incorporated in a vintage way. Stupid? Yes. But if that's the only ad that you've seen today that struck you as dumb, consider yourself lucky.

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Didn't Think Of It That Way...

Since they may have wanted the best of both worlds, at least in terms of old computers, how about a Tandy 1000x with a Commodore 64 bootscreen? Certainly representative of two of the 1980's "mass" market machines!
It just struck me as odd. The only reason I even caught the commercial is that I was watching Lou Dobbs and writing at the same time (on an equally vintage machine, my Tandy Model 102), when I looked up and caught the ad. I've seen some really bad ads before (people looking through the eyepiece of a Newtonian telescope... and it's actually pointing towards the ground, for instance). Generally, though, they're just white noise to me... sometimes, though, the signal-to-noise ratio gets a little tipped in their favor.

Rob

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