Apple Cans Second Switch Campaign

For over a year Apple had been planning to produce a new series of Switch ads featuring people who connected with Apple for the first time by purchasing an iPod and then went on to purchase a Mac.

And now, three months after shooting the spots, the campaign has been cancelled. The spots were done by Moxie Pictures and Errol Morris who directed the first campaign. Apparently there was tension on the set about how to portray their switchees...which seems to be the reasoning for the plug being pulled.

In the first batch of ads, Morris took six ordinary users and filmed them describing their bad experiences with PCs. Now they'd switched to Mac computers, everything was fine. It was both timely and plausible - so what could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately, irony intervened. The high concept was to film the switchers as recovering members of a victim support group. The six individuals, who looked fine, healthy and happy in real life were cruelly presented in muted monochromatic colors. The art direction fitted them with odd haircuts and unfamiliar clothes for the occasion, we later discovered, and their tales were told over mocking music. It was an exercise in cruelty apparently designed to repel middle America. Who would want to be associated with this bunch of freaks, we noted at the time. (See Monday night at the Single's Club? Apple's Real People). It spawned a discussion thread on the PC Magazine forum that lasted 18 months and gathered over 10,000 comments.

Hadn't anyone told Apple that irony was dead?

Apple listened, and for the next round of switchers, the advertising agency used a new set of switchers in full color, all looked happy and some were even smiling! Unfortunately generic American advertising uses happy smiling people very widely, so the originality of the campaign had been blunted. The campaign later inspired some inventive parodies, briefly made a cult figure out of Ellen Feiss, and dragged on until recently.