I've never heard someone complain the ads don't work. Their factual accuracy, on the other hand, is far more dubious. But they're good ads.

I've always wondered how you tell if an ad has actually "worked" -- Apple's increased revenue could be due to a million different things.

There are many studies on just this thing. Primarily examine mass communications journals if you're interested in scholarly research. But the two most common:

1) Focus groups. Take a group of people, have them fill out a questionnaire, watch a group of ads, then answer the questionnaire. These have become more effective over time as the result of methodological research on research bias. In the "early days" people were given a set of questions, watched THE AD, and then answered the same set of questions. It turns out, though, that those questions 'primed the pump' and skewed results when compared to a more neutral setting where there are many questions about many products and then many ads.

2) Market research. Take two representative regions, deploy one advert in one location and another at the other, compare and contrast. Again, this has improved over time where it used to be "nothing vs. something", but that really showed the effectiveness of advertising, not the result of a specific campaign.

Simple answer: you can't. Best you can do is ask people why they bought from you, but usually their response is suspect. Most will say "through a well-balanced comparison of your competitors" when the answer is really "your ads had the best-looking font."

Well, it was a nice excuse to analyze RoadRunner cartoons, but there's no data refuting the claim that the ads don't work.

Haha true. Reading those "Roadrunner laws" though was really interesting - trying to think back to the cartoons and making sure they all applied.

man, I guess these stupid Mac ads don't work

"Despite new products like the iPhone, variations of the iPod and the Apple TV set-top box, this was a Macintosh quarter. Apple shipped 2.3 million Mac computers in the quarter, 51 percent more than in the quarter a year ago. Revenue on those computers increased 54 percent."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/technology/24apple.html

old article but then again this ad campaign has been running a while

You could easily apply the same logic to the current presidential campaigns.

I'm not sure I understand. I can't think of any ads I've seen that make you sympathize with the incompetent opponent. Could you elaborate?

It was more about not appearing to be the elite... You want to be the underdog, not the intellectual or similar. Both sides want you to feel they're like you and the other is aloof or out of touch.

I'm glad that somebody got something good out of all of those hours watching the Road Runner.

I'm just not sure that Road Runner is the source of all goodness when it comes to advertising. Sounds more like a simplistic meme than a principle you can actually use.

I like the ads, but then again, I still like my PC. Perhaps they should switch to more of an Elmer Fudd paradigm.

The idea is a very limited universe. Telling the same story with the same tools. Repetition without repetition. Repetition is one of the most effective ways of changing how people feel about something.

Yep I got it.

Only it's not working for me. Perhaps the thing that is repeated and the style of repetition is more important than simply repeating.

In other words, once you generalize the article enough to get some meaning from it, you're left with the empty feeling that the obvious was stated and the hard parts were left out.

Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me. I should have explained myself better but was trying to be as terse as possible.

My adblock plus block the whole ad page.