Motorola is picking a fight with Apple, attempting to use the latter’s iconic “1984″ ad against the the company.
A video hyping an upcoming Super Bowl ad for Motorola’s Xoom tablet lays down the gauntlet. Called “Goodbye 1984,” the ad features a shot of Earth — from space — outfitted with a pair of iPod earbuds. “2011 looks a lot like 1984,” reads the ad. “One authority. One design. It’s time for more choices.”
The ad then touts features from the Xoom, like a dual-core 1GHz processor, 1080p HD video playback, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera.
A rep from Motorola said that the company’s PR agency, Weber Shandwick, created the video, which is meant to hype a 60-second ad, by New York ad agency Anomaly, that will run in the second quarter.
When Apple ran the “1984″ ad during that year’s Super Bowl, the company posed as an alternative to the domineering PC industry, as represented by IBM. Twenty-seven years later, Apple is the industry behemoth with a market capitalization in excess of $300 billion, which is not only higher than IBM’s, but higher than that of any other company in the world, save ExxonMobil.
Not surprisingly, rivals have used Apple’s “1984″ playbook against the company. In 2009, Microsoft ran a campaign showing “average consumers” snubbing their noses at Apple’s high-priced laptops and choosing Windows-based machines instead. In 2006, SanDisk also launched a campaign called “iDon’t” that attacked iPod users as conformists.
Of course, one major flaw in Motorola’s argument is that, although Apple’s iPad has commanding share of the tablet PC market, smartphones based on the Android OS are actually more popular than ones based on Apple’s iOS, according to one study. It should also be...
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