user friendly

Aww, isn't she ADORABLE!

One thing:

Who's the target audience, here? Because I've used computers my whole life, PCs and Macs both, and I can't tell what the fuck this little girl is doing.

The point, clearly, is how easy it is—an appeal, I guess, to those who might otherwise be swayed by the Apple operating system's "user friendly" rep—but the overall impression (to me, at least) is confusion. Here's a step by step:

How Kylie Sends Pictures of Her

Fish, Dorothy, to Her Family

1. "I plug this thingie in here"—OK, with you so far.
2. "And now you click this"—wait a second, wait a second. Some window popped up, and then another one did—not clear what part is happening as a result of Step 1 and what part Kylie is doing herself by clicking...or what she clicked on, or what the clicking is for...
3. A picture comes up on the screen. Was that still from the unspecified clicking, or is it another step Kylie just isn't commenting on?
4. "I'm going to make this picture much better. I click"—Kylie clicks on...well, I guess she's clicking on something that says "Auto adjust," although you can only tell that by freezing the frame—"It's better!"
5. "I'm going to send it to my mom and dad"—magically we are already on an e-mail window, and Kylie is clicking send.

The dude at Slate commented on how emphasizing that "even a child can do this" is sort of culturally tone deaf ("Who among us doubts the superior technical savvy of the modern child?"), but it is also extremely telling that every shot of the screen is like a close-up of one part of one window: you very rarely see a whole window, or watch the mouse move to click on anything in particular.* It's like MTV editing where you only catch glimpses of what's going on.

In other words, this ad about how easy it is to do something on a PC takes great pains to make it as unclear as possible what's actually being done on the PC. The one thing we know for sure is that the editing obscures the process rather than illuminating it.

And what does that tell us?

I'm not even going to comment on this campaign as a response to the "Hi, I'm a Mac" campaign because it's too dumb. (Not dumb in terms of hoodwinking consumers, necessarily—it's may be extremely canny from that perspective—just dumb if taken seriously as a serious argument of any kind.) But what I will say is that the overall effect of this ad is to make computers seem more mystifying: watching this, I feel the way I imagine my grandmother would feel if I tried to show her how to enable file-sharing or something.

There is something deeply, subtly wrong with this ad, and I suppose what it really comes down to is the main thing I'm usually complaining about when I'm complaining about most ads: it is bullshit, and it is designed to manipulate you. I think we all need to be a little more irritated by this shit than we generally are—that's what I'm sayin'.

Respek.

* Compare to this old iPhone ad, in which you are actually watching—in real time—as a hand model(?) actually uses the actually extremely user-friendly iPhone.