Advertising evolution

Inaccurate advertising campaigns drive me batty. Seriously send me over the deep end. That Jeff Goldblum Apple campaign a few years back nearly killed me. The ubiquitous “Think different” advertisements were enough to make me vow to hate Apple computers. “Different” is an adjective. Not that you need a grammar lesson, but different describes nouns. “I loved her hair; it was really different.” That is an acceptable sentence using the word “different,” where “different” describes “it” which refers to “hair.”

Even as a two word ad campaign, “Think different” fails to inspire brand confidence in me. Did they mean “think differently,” as in, “use Apple products and think differently about your world/life/computer”? Or did they really mean “think different,” as in “when you think of Apple products, think of ours as different from competitors”? Or did they really think they could dupe a whole mass of consumers into thinking it was OK to write grammatically ambiguous messages?

It’s not OK to write grammatically ambiguous messages.

Flash forward to now, present day, 2006. Askjeeves.com has become Ask.com. It seems like an OK product except for one glaring problem: inaccurate advertising campaign syndrome. Ask.com is currently airing a television commercial that shows a man and woman working in some sort of scientific animal testing facility. The man uses Ask.com as the woman watches over his shoulder while holding a chimpanzee in her arms. The man wonders, “if we didn’t use Ask.com’s internet tools, what would we be like?” The chimpanzee answers, “animals with pants?”

Terrible. Terrible information provision. We already know chimpanzees are skilled tool makers and users. They frequently shop at Sears for the latest Craftsman cordless power tools. OK, well that’s a joke, but Jane Goodall has already shown us that chimpanzees can use well-chosen sticks to fish for termites. If I recall my Imax educational films properly, mother chimpanzees teach the termite fishing skill to their children; teachable behavior indicates intelligence and not instinct. The use of tools to classify humans as better than animals has already been disproven. Some would go so far as to call it species-ism to continue to promote the idea that humans are superior to animals. I don’t go that far, but I wanted to make that point—we aren’t better than animals in pants just because we are able to use tools available to us on the internet.

The bigger question I am left with, “how can I trust an information product that clearly can’t handle information accurately?” might actually rattle me more than “Think different.” It’s a toss-up whether I get more uptight about proper language usage or about appropriate informational analogies, but, without proper grammar, aren’t we just chimpanzees fishing for termites?