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Piggyback Advertising (4/7/00)
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Leave it to Apple to master the art of turning other people's commercials into ads for their own technology. Remember back when Star Wars: Episode I was the most hotly-anticipated cinematic event in the history of film? That was, of course, before people got to see how much of a letdown it was. Really, let's be honest for a second, here... without even getting into the whole Jar-Jar issue, think back to when the lights came down in the theater and you sat there with your adrenaline pumping, hardly believing you were finally going to see Episode I, ready for another chapter in the epic struggle of Dark versus Light. When you read those scrolling words that faded off into the blackness of space, didn't you just think to yourself, "Wait a minute, did that say trade embargoes?!"
But we digress. Our point is, when the whole world was in the grip of Episode I fever, Apple scored a major coup by hosting the Internet version of the movie's trailers exclusively in QuickTime format. Downloads of QuickTime shot through the roof, as dazed fans scrambled to snatch up any info they could find on the film. Apple got a huge PR boost by showing somebody else's commercial. How efficient was that? And ever since then, of course, Apple's been posting QuickTime versions of tons of movie trailers, continuing to promote its multimedia delivery architecture just by hyping other people's products.
Well, recently Apple's gotten even better at it. Now the QuickTime trailers even feature Apple's logo and the "Think Different" slogan in the Flash-interface "letterbox" area below the trailers themselves. You can see this in the brand-new Lord of the Rings preview pointed out by faithful viewer Jean Willi. Pretty spiffy work, if we do say so ourselves-- and the movie looks to be shaping up well, too. Plus, we're pretty sure that when Lord of the Rings is released in Christmastime of 2001, it'll have awesome special effects and it won't be about trade embargoes. Bonus!
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SceneLink (2214)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 4/7/00 episode: April 7, 2000: The iMac gains another role: that of a stop-smoking aid. Meanwhile, Microsoft teams with La-Z-Boy to fire the first volley in the Internet furniture wars, and Apple perfects the art of advertising its own technology by hyping other people's movies...
Other scenes from that episode: 2212: The Twelve-Step iMac (4/7/00) Will the life-improving wonders of the Mac never cease? You already know that owning an iMac in a flavor matched to your personal aura and operating it on a schedule attuned to your natural biorhythms can reduce stress, improve your mental health, and promote a general sense of oneness with the Universe... 2213: ScotchGard or CyberPatrol? (4/7/00) Everyone knows that computing technology in evolving into "appliances," right? The buzz in the industry is that real people don't want computers, which are expensive, complex, and hard to use. They want "Internet appliances," which we can only assume means that there's a growing market for blenders and Salad Shooters that can look up current stock prices...
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