[taraleigh]

Tonight some of my friends came into town to play a show as Mat Kearney's band (www.matkearney.com). And well, I've met Mat, but didn't really consider myself as someone who "knows him knows him." So I went to the show to see Tyler play guitar for him and found out that Will was playing drums and Jeff was playing bass. Who knew?

Anyway, we all ended up grabbing some dinner at a fine little Tapas bar on the Lower East Side. On the way from the venue to dinner, we kept passing all these signs with sheep on them, emblazoned with the phrase "iDont.com"

NYC tends to be plastered with multiple copies of ads, all side by side, so that they will get your attention more than just one measley (is that really a word?) poster. The repetition is eye catching.

So I made a mental note to check out iDont.com when I got home. I guess their advertising efforts are working. At least on me.

What I found is that iDont.com is a website intended to propogate the usage of any type of MP3 player other than the iPod, but specifically their Sansa e200. They say that only "sheep" are iPod users. That we are mindless fools, blindly following Apple. Seriously? C'mon, Steve Jobs isn't exactly Bono (haha! just a little joke!).

I'm not really down with the mudslinging marketing, but iDont has picked their target market well. The LES is the epicenter of NYC's non-conformity and anti-establishment community. I saw more posters in the East Village when i was walking home, but I haven't seen them anywhere else in the city yet. Well done, iDont. But I'm sticking with my white ear buds and my track wheel.

I love you, Apple.

[mike]

I love what SanDisk is doing with this marketing campaign. They totally get that Apple's marketing, as ever, is a polarizing force. So, rather than try to winge on and on about how their product is better, they figure they can pick up some peeps from the non-joiners.

The problem is that non-conformists are pretty specific and limited about that to which they're not conformed.

[adam]

As 'nifty' as that little device may be, they're marketing campaign is ultimately flawed because rebelling against something just for rebellion's sake, as Nick Hexum says: "...you're still controlled by the course that the other man takes..."

As for Apple. Well...I'm typing this on a PowerBook (that's charging an iPod by the way) so...yeah, there ya go.


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I wanna be where the talk of the town is about last night when the sun went down.