In 2006 Apple launched its famous “Get a Mac” advertising campaign, comparing the capabilities of a ‘hip’ Apple computer and its ‘dull’ Windows counterpart. The campaign attracted a lot of attention, and even Microsoft responded to it directly with the 2008 “I’m a PC” ads.
And there are the dozens of spin-offs, using the familiar “all white background” format. One of the companies that made an ad inspired by the Get a Mac campaign is BitTorrent Inc., and interestingly enough they targeted an Apple product.
The BitTorrent vs. iTunes ads, which were never officially released to the public, emphasize how people can get higher quality content on BitTorrent at much faster speeds. They were created in 2007, before the iTunes store offered the high-definition downloads that were already commonplace on BitTorrent.
To find out more about the origin of the campaign TorrentFreak got in touch with Alvir Navin, who wrote the scripts together with Nic Birondo. Alvir, brother of BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin, was working as director of content services at BitTorrent at the time.
“Back in 2007, a lot of users were complaining that iTunes downloads weren’t that fast, especially during the holiday season when the iTunes servers were taxed by the popularity of the service. So we played on the ‘Mac vs PC’ ad campaign to highlight the difference between centralized and decentralized content delivery,” Alvir told us.
“This was really just a fun project for me and a few friends that allowed us to pay homage to a few of our favorite film genres, drive home a relevant point about new methods of content delivery, and throw in a few digs about closed ecosystems,” he added.
For reasons unknown the ad campaign was never released. We recently stumbled onto it at the portfolio page of director Lucas Abel but other than that the campaign had never received any exposure.
In total three clips were produced titled “Crowd Beatdown”, “Zombies vs. Ninjas” and “Director’s Chair”. All follow the same format as the ads from the original Get a Mac campaign. The full credits listing all the people who helped create the videos are available at Lucas Abel’s website.
