1. IKEA Planning Tools
IKEA Planner Tools is IKEA‘s field marketing tool that enables you to become your own interior designer. It seems to be the same application available at the stores on public terminals used by shoppers. Simple to install and quite intuitive with a drag-and-drop-from-list interface that details the furniture models offerings at IKEA. You’d be able to choose furniture to fit the exact measurements of the rooms in your home and experiment with different combinations and style by swap things around until you’re satisfied with the result. A much more high tech method to would-be home planners than the usual cutting out papers in furniture shapes and moving it around the room, visualizing how thing would look like. The downside? There are 4 different tools for 4 different parts of your home – kitchen, office, bathroom and bedroom – so if you’re remaking your whole house you’re suppose to download all four and install all four respectively.

download from here.

2. BoConcept’s Furnish
If you’re not keen on IKEA furniture or their interior design software then maybe you could give Furnish from BoConcept a try. In the same vein as IKEA’s Planner Tools, Furnish is an interior decorating software which lets you plan the perfect interior for your home. Furnish is much more customizable than IKEA’s Planner Tools allowing you to give color to your walls, ceiling, etc. Furnish also gives you more control by letting you create pieces of virtual furniture with whatever fronts, arm rests, leg designs or veneer types you like. Simply enter the dimensions of your room and start drawing or select from pre-existing furniture i assume belongs to the models offered at BoDesign.

Download from here.

3. Michael Lachmann MLCAD
Not into interior design? Well you could try MLCAD which is an acronym for Mike’s LEGO Computer Aided Design. Written by Michael Lachmann it’s an easy to use virtual modeling program aimed at LEGO enthusiast specifically for use with LEGO parts. MLCad uses the LDraw official parts libary of virtual bricks and/or the tools like LDView or LPub which are bricks currently under developement to enable you to build almost any LEGO model virtually with an unlimited amount of bricks.

Here is a quick tutorial to get you started and downloadable from here. Libarary files are from here. Extract and dump into the same directory.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What do the characters represent?
At the beginning of all the ads, the characters introduce themselves by saying “Hello, I’m a Mac”, and “I’m a PC” respectively. This in itself is already a contradiction.

According to Wikipedia, a Personal Computer (PC) is usually a computer with a microprocessor whose price, size, and capabilities make it suitable for personal usage. The term was popularized by (surprise surprise) Apple Computer with the Apple II in the late-1970s and early-1980s, and afterwards by IBM with the IBM PC.

The term IBM PC is actually closer to what people think of when referring to a PC. The reason for the commonly heard comparitive, “PC vs. Mac”, is because Macs originally used a non-IBM compatible processor. With Apple’s shift of Mac CPU architecture however, those Macs are now IBM Compatible PCs.

So the two characters in the ads are actually the same thing! In fact, in the ad titled WSJ, you hear the Mac being referred to as a PC!

The actual representations.
The ads actually leave the viewers with the impression that the PC character is actually Microsoft’s Windows operating system while the Mac character is Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. This is despite the fact that there are alternative operating systems that can run on a PC, such as a Linux based system.

A little more far-fetched is the observation that the character who plays the PC has a slight facial resemblance to Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates.

How is it good, creative, and effective advertising?
There are many different reasons for advertising a product, but the main underlying purpose is to generate, or increase, sales.

These Apple TV ads are capitalizing on the general public’s mis-perception of PCs, Macs, and operating systems to create a “Macs are better than Windows PCs” mindset in consumers. The next time a consumer thinks of buying a computer, they would recall all the portrayed faults of a Windows PC and be more inclined towards buying a Mac.

According to Apple’s 2006 3rd Quarter report, Apple shipped 1,327,000 Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing 12 percent growth over the corresponding period.

There are of course many other factors for increased sales; high iPod sales for one thing could lead to higher Mac computer sales because iPods work most seamlessly on a Mac. But Apple’s more aggressive and focused marketing campaign must also be credited with its increase in sales.

How is it bad, misleading, and pointless advertising?
Not only do the ads deepen the mis-perception that consumers have on PCs, Macs, and operating systems, they also present some inaccurate information!

In one of the Mac ads titled Out of the Box, the PC is portrayed as requiring additional installation/setup work and also having many redundant trial softwares while the Mac is portrayed as being able to immediately work “out of the box”. This is inaccurate and misleading in that it is the manufacturer who installs many of these ‘redundant’ softwares in the OEM version of the Windows operating system as part of their bundling.

In another ad titled Networking, the PC is portrayed as unable to ‘synchronize’ with the ‘digital camera from Japan’ while the Mac has no problems doing so. In reality, most (if not all) electronic manufacturers create products that will work equally easily on both operating systems.

So is this good, or bad advertising?
The answer is both.