Wed, June 21, 2006

So this is just about the most reprehensible thing in the history of ever. (Sorry, millions of Jews!) At first, I was merely whipped into a froth-spewing frenzy of vitriol, but a new development has really sent me over the top.

I was driving around LA a few weekends ago, and I noticed some of those cheapy wheatpaste posters on a temporary construction wall. In LA, you see these a lot – ordinarily, they'd be promoting indie bands or local events, but more and more often they're promoting Hollywood movies or iPods. Anyway, in this case they were promoting iDon't – a website denouncing the iPod as a tool of conformist oppression and Apple as the greedy corporate behemoth responsible for brainwashing us into believing we need one.

I railed against this at the time, because what does anyone have to gain by calling iPod users "sheep"? (Except their own smug self-satisfaction... as it happens, I just watched South Park's brilliant "Smug Alert!" episode last night.) If you hate iPods so much, don't buy an iPod. What's the point of being a prick and castigating people who do? It's not like they're doing something that actually harms you in any way (e.g., smokers, Bush voters). Plus, it's not like we've got poor people who've been duped into buying iPods they don't need, wandering around with their savings squandered and no music to listen to. People who buy iPods buy them because they like the idea of portable, high quality music – not because of peer pressure or an ad campaign. People who truly don't need an iPod generally don't have an iPod. I don't see why the success of the iPod necessarily makes owning one some sort of conformist cop-out. Doing something enjoyable doesn't make me a sheep. It's like saying, "Hah! You're having sex now?! You totally drank the Kool-Aid." Worse yet, it's like those people who look down their noses at you because you own a fucking TV.

I'm not an iPod fanatic and I wasn't an early adopter. I'm not particularly fond of the iPod ads (or most ads, for that matter). I don't feel particularly bound to the community of iPod owners. But I appreciate the ability to have a large range of musical options available to me pretty much anywhere. It's good on the plane; it's good in the car; it's great for background music at parties when you don't want to have to keep swapping out CDs or something.

There are valid reasons not to own an iPod, but non-conformism isn't one of them. In fact, there are only three that I can think of:

1. Already have an iPod.

2. Don't have a spare $300 laying around.

3. Don't have any use for an MP3 player.

Those are pretty big reasons. If you fail all three (and, on a global scale, relatively few do) then you may as well get an iPod. Unless you've got some sort of psychotic objection to its ad campaign, or some obsessive attachment to the WMA DRM model.

Which is a long way of saying: I really detest the iDon't campaign.

Then, today, I noticed some banner ads on The Onion for iDon't. "Whoa," I thought. "It's one thing to print some posters and paste them up around town. Buying pricey online ad space is a really long way to go for your stupid anti-consumerist grudge." So, I clicked to see what was going on. What I found pissed me off almost as much as the WMD thing.

The entire iDon't campaign is only to promote a new MP3 player from SanDisk. They've got an angry indie Flash animation of sheep wearing white earphones. They've got grungy signs with grungy fonts (in hindsight, this should've been an instant tip-off). They've got a snarky, mean-spirited blog about how much the iPod sucks. And all of it is there to point you to "the alternative": the SanDisk player. For a half-second I was naive enough to think, "Well, maybe these counter-culture jackasses just really like the SanDisk player and they're offering it up as an alternative for people who hate iPod ads as much as they do, but still must have an MP3 player." So I checked, and sure enough – the owner of idont.com is SanDisk, Inc. (It was really easy; these lazy fuckers barely even covered their tracks. You can do your own WHOIS search if you want.)

So, what drives me up the wall about this is that the entire argument is based on how we should reject ad campaigns that feed us an identity or a world view just for the purpose of selling us something... and then they go and do just that. This is obnoxious not because I happen to own an iPod and sort of like it: it's obnoxious just because it's fucking obnoxious. Don't get me wrong: SanDisk should absolutely be producing an iPod competitor and they should absolutely be advertising it. The whole concept of capitalism (which is still a good thing, despite whatever iDon't says) is that you produce a product you think people will like, and you do your best to sell it to them. You don't give up on competition just because someone else is doing it way better and having way more success. But to take the iPod, copy its basic design and functionality, and then try to sell it by saying it's the alternative to all that the iPod stands for – well, that's just downright false. It's the alternative to the iPod color scheme, and the alternative to paying Apple for your MP3 player. (And, most likely, the alternative to having a well crafted MP3 player that "just works" and lacks irritating technical glitches.) But, positioning yourself as an alternative to iPod's popularity is dicey at best. It's smart to leverage Apple's larger marketing budget against them, by making their ubiquitous ads into anti-ads for your product, but you're kind of banking on your own failure at the same time. You'd better hope iPods keep selling well, or else there goes your market!

I guess guerilla marketing is one of those realities we just have to face. Sometimes it'll be cute and non-threatening – like the Burger King chicken or whatever – and sometimes it'll be infuriatingly dishonest. Maybe I should embrace this thing because perhaps some actual counter-culture asshole will be fooled by the whole thing and think he's found a community of sniping, hate-filled iPod detractors, when in fact he's just cozied up to a different giant technology corporation. It's a punk on the very same hypothetical dipshits I despised for the iDon't website back when I thought it was real. There's some cosmic balance in that.

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