Shiny new toys come out all the time. Our human ADD kicks in…we blush…we buy.

The shiniest toy of late is Google+.  Yes, it’s cool but calm down.  It’s even got smart people like David Armano fooled.

1) I get it.

2) Great they have degrees!!  This is LinkedIn circa 2004!  Do you really think Facebook can’t pull this off tomorrow? Of course they can! They don’t want to until they have to or Zuck decides it so.  If this Google+’s biggest differentiator, then let’s say goodbye right now!

3) 90% of users are men.  We like big boy toys that make big boy noise.  It’s why we’re typically the largest early adopters of tech and do things like buy Harleys.

4) My dad doesn’t give a rat’s a$5!  I have over 100 people in my Google+ already.  Guess what?  The only people I see posting in my feed are the same people creating inside of Twitter, which means the rest are just passer-bys.

5) Success? Yes. I think Google+ has great potential, and I love what it can do.  But I’ve met too many talented people and products in my young life that never cashed in on their potential.

Bonus: Did you see The Social Network? Zuck had the insight to let it grow, to get its own identity…to grow organically.  The majority of posts in my Facebook newsfeed are not from brands or the social media nerds like me.  They’re from my real friends.  When Google+ gets that, then I’ll make crazy statements like, “EXTRA! EXTRA! Google+ Defeats Twitter!” or “Read All About It…Facebook Slain by David!”

As told by Hulu CEO, Jason Kilar…what do you think?

Distributors will certainly play a role in the future of TV, but we believe that three potent forces will be far more powerful in shaping that future: consumers, advertisers and content owners.

Consumers have spoken emphatically as to what they want and what they do not want in their future television experience. What we’ve heard:

* Traditional TV has too many ads. Users have demonstrated that they will go to great lengths to avoid the advertising load that traditional TV places upon them. Setting aside sports and other live event programming, consumers are increasingly moving to on-demand viewing, in part because of the lighter ad load (achieved via ad-skipping DVRs, traditional video on demand systems, and/or online viewing).
* Consumers want TV to be more convenient for them. People want programs to start at a time that is convenient for their schedules, not at a time dictated to them. Consumption of original TV episodes will eventually mirror theatrical movie attendance: big opening Friday nights, but more consumption will be in the days and weeks afterward. Consumers also want the freedom to be able to watch TV on whatever screen is most convenient for them, be it a smartphone, a tablet, a PC, or, yes, a TV.
* Consumers are demonstrating that they are the greatest marketing force a good television show or movie could ever have, given the powerful social media tools at consumers’ disposal. Consumers now also have the power to immediately tank a bad series, given how fast and broad consumer sentiment is disseminated. This is nothing short of a game-changer for content creators, owners, and distributors.

The above trends are a reality and we believe the wise move is to find ways to exploit these new trends and leverage them to build great businesses. History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers. Hulu is not burdened by that legacy.

Advertisers have weighed in heavily on the future of TV, with both their thoughts and their considerable wallets. Advertisers are increasingly expecting to present their advertising messages to just their desired audience…and not to anyone else. For over 60 years, video advertising could only be bought via a TV show’s projected audience, which served as a blunt proxy for a certain target audience. The result has been many wasted impressions and an often irrelevant experience for consumers. In the near future, advertisers will demand the ability to target their messages to people rather than targeting their messages to TV shows as proxies for people.

Content owners, the third factor in the future of TV, have been very clear: they as a group need to make a fair return on their significant investment in creating content. Content owners will license their best content in the best windows to those distributors that pay the most on a per-user per-month basis. Content owners will bundle their content to the degree customers will respond, simply because it is in the content owners’ economic interest to do so. If enough customers refuse to purchase their bundles, then the bundles will either be reduced in price/scope (possible) or dismantled (far less likely). Customers will ultimately make the decisions here.

With the above dynamics in mind, we believe that there is going to be tremendous near-term innovation in the pay TV distribution business. The internet has made it possible for new entrants to innovate quickly and materially. Consumers will have more choice and convenience going forward. This competition will drive prices and margins down in pay TV distribution. A greater percentage of the economic pie will flow back to content owners and creators. As mentioned before, advertisers will be able to target their messages to people, not to TV shows as proxies for people. Going forward, rapid innovation, low margins, and customer obsession will define the winners in pay TV distribution.

The above has influenced the path the Hulu team has taken to date. In 2007, we began the process of building what is now the leading online video advertising service. Based on metrics from Nielsen/IAG, Hulu’s video advertising service is roughly 2x as effective as traditional TV video advertising services. Our point of view since 2007 has been that if we become the most effective video advertising service, then we could earn higher advertising revenues (per hour of content consumed) than anyone else’s ad business. We also have been highly focused on the reality that advertising monetization during a DVR session is headed steadily downhill, which is a looming issue for content owners. And the answer is not adding a full broadcast ad load to the video-on-demand experience (that will just drive DVR viewing – and ad-skipping – further north). Our conviction remains that if we respect the customer and innovate effectively, we can pay content owners more from the ad side of the business than anyone else’s ad service can do (be that live/linear consumption or DVR viewing). The below chart compares how much revenue Hulu currently generates from advertising per half-hour tv episode versus the advertising revenue that traditional distribution generates.

In the near to mid term, we anticipate being able to generate higher advertising returns than any traditional channel can from their advertising service, for any type of content. We’ve invented patentable technology that has enabled us to deliver much more relevant video advertising and to do so in a manner that generates much higher recall and purchase intent than other video advertising services. The market is responding: we expect to approach half a billion in total revenues (advertising and subscription combined) in 2011, up from $263 million in 2010, which was up from $108 million in 2009.

But advertising is only part of the equation. The other part is subscription. We officially launched Hulu Plus on November 17, 2010, 11 weeks ago. Hulu Plus is a dual revenue stream subscription service; one revenue stream from the subscription fee, the other from a modest amount of advertising (half the advertising that you’ll see on traditional TV). Hulu Plus includes full current season access to many of TV’s top programs, on an array of internet connected devices, available anytime in an unlimited fashion, for $7.99/month. Our subscriber count will pass 1 million this year, to our knowledge the fastest start of any online video subscription service. In the fall, we expect Hulu Plus as a business will have a revenue run rate north of $200 million. A key element of Hulu Plus is that we are able to compensate content owners more per-user per-month than anyone else for the same body of content. We are able to do this because of the subscription fee, our unusually effective and market-leading advertising service, and our tolerance for thin margins.

The opportunity for content owners.

We believe content owners are in a strong position to make higher returns from TV content distribution in the future than they have historically. If studios and networks license their content to distributors with per-user per-month economics as the model (as opposed to a fixed fee model), then they will be able to extract a higher portion of the total economics their content will generate. We state this given our belief that the majority of the US population (and a material percent of the globe) will be subscribers to some flavor of digital premium content service going forward. We also believe that any number of digital distribution companies have the ability to quickly get to scale; getting to scale is not the hard part about this business. Over the past 4 years, studios and networks have not always insisted on per-user per-month economics in their digital licensing agreements, which has resulted in a regretted under-pricing of their content to digital distributors. That said, we believe that all studios and networks will recognize that it is in their economic interest to insist on per-user per-month pricing in all their distribution relationships (library content and current content). Given the above future, we see strong upside for content owners that are laser-focused on the per-user per-month economics. A greater percentage of the pie should flow to content owners and creators in the future.

Free, ad-supported services.

Given all this talk of dual revenue streams, what becomes of free, ad-supported services like the original Hulu service? We think content owners will pursue one of two paths for each individual piece of content, each for valid reasons:

1. A portion of content will leverage free, ad-supported services aggressively, given a digital service like Hulu provides unusually high ad monetization when compared to DVR sessions and even the bulk of live linear ad monetization. For a substantial body of content, we suspect that Hulu’s ad supported free service will provide the best financial return available to those content owners/creators. We expect significant experimentation will continue as it relates to windowing, as we have seen these past 3 years.

2. Another portion of content will only be available to users that either subscribe directly to a digital service or, alternatively, authenticate that they already have a traditional pay TV subscription. Once a user is recognized as a pay TV service subscriber, the user will be able to watch a specified body of content.

Hulu’s responsibility is to deliver the world’s leading dual revenue stream service and to deliver the world’s leading free, ad-supported service. We expect the free Hulu service to be a core part of our business for years to come, and one that will continue to earn enthusiasm from our users. The stronger the returns we can drive in our free, ad-supported service, the more content will show up in that service. The same goes for our Hulu Plus dual revenue stream service. Clearly, content owners will decide which distribution channels are best for them. As we deliver leading services, Hulu will pay content owners and creators more per-user per-month than anyone else. At the same time, we will be able to price our services for consumers lower than anyone else offering the same body of content, given our market-leading ad service and our tolerance for low margins.

The relentless pursuit of better ways.

It is clear to us that — because of the internet and the increased competition/innovation it brings — the future of TV is going to be very good to users, advertisers and content owners/creators. Users will have convenient access to much more content. We also expect to see lower consumer prices, which will be a function of a marked increase in distribution competition. Advertisers will be able to efficiently and effectively target their messages to just their desired audience, thanks to the internet medium. And content owners will have the opportunity to make higher financial returns, which will be a function of disciplined per-user per-month licensing strategies, along with the benefits that come with intensified distribution competition.

Our journey at Hulu involves significant risk. That is the nature of innovation, particularly the business of re-inventing television. A number of you that are reading this might be thinking that we’d have to be crazy to think that our small team can actually re-invent television and compete effectively against a landscape of distribution giants like cable companies, satellite companies, and huge online companies. We are crazy. All entrepreneurs need to be. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it and there would be no naysayers. We are nothing if not a team that believes in the value of convictions, thoughtful stubbornness, and the relentless pursuit of better ways.

Jason Kilar
Hulu CEO
jason@hulu.com

Source: Hulu Blog

Last night, I put a post on my TumbleBlog about the reason my wife still wants a Bluray player over a Roku XDS. Her #1 reason: I like to hold the physical box.

She called me out that I’m too far ahead of where most people are.  My last post on this topic proves that.  She’s likely right too; however I read this about 10 minutes ago from Cynopsis Digital:

Plastic is dead. The era of the DVD – which had been one of the fastest growing and most popular consumer electronics innovations ever – is fading fast, according to new research from In-Stat. The company expects double-digit declines in retail sales of physical discs, to the tune of a drop of $4.6 billion from 2009 to 2014. But content providers shouldn’t fear because the money is simply shifting to digital outlets. The market for paid download and streaming should grow from $2.3 billion to $6.3 billion within five years, In-Stat said. “Video disc rentals will continue their significant decline,” said Keith Nissen, Principal Analyst. “Netflix is already shifting its focus to online streaming, and Red Box is evaluating a similar strategy. The convenience and utility of the online offerings are simply too compelling. Ultimately, it will be impossible for physical disc kiosks to compete with the in-home or in-store download-to-rent business model.” The revenue for TV downloads in the US will triple between 2010 and 2014, with online subscription revenue closing in on $3.5 billion by 2014.

How many of you are starting to shift to a pure digital/streaming media library?  If not, what are your hold-ups?

Typically, I’m not a huge fan of going to trade shows or conferences unless some business will be taking place.  They’re fantastic for meeting with several clients and partners in one place, but the rest of it can be a total time suck.

Last year, I attended DMA in San Diego.  It was ok at best, and I left wondering how much longer this organization was going to be relevant.

Since then, DMA has been touting how they will rebrand their image to adapt to the new technologies that are constantly flooding the direct marketing industry.  For a few reasons, I wasn’t able to attend DMA10 this year in San Francisco (always sad to miss that fantastic city).  However, I had a few of my inside sources roaming the grounds for me.

The overall take on DMA10 was that traditional forms took a beating, new marketing technologies were highly touted, but there was a real lack of digital companies to provide the foundation for an event that would catapult DMA into relevancy for 2011.

Under the leadership of the new CEO Larry Kimmel, the DMA is on the right track, but these 5 things would really help them become more relevant again.

1)   Stop trying to downplay the future relevance of traditional channels such as direct mail.  These organizations have kept the lights on for a long time at DMA and have mastered the art of reaching target audiences.  It is a strength of your organization and should be treated as such.

2)   Meet my friends SXSW, IRCE & adTech: When it comes to matching innovative technologies with multi-channel marketing and sales, these 3 shows are the leaders.  SOLUTION: Figure out a way to partner and grow with these shows.  Austin, San Francisco and New York are great cities in which to have your presence felt.

2a) San Francisco: Keep DMA permanently here for the time being so as to mix and mingle amongst the emerging companies.

3)   Get Younger for Better Education: When new medical students are released from their long educational journey, hospitals will fight for their talents because they know the latest techniques.  The same rule should apply for the DMA.  DMA has new technologies being touted, but there are not enough individuals in the audience that understand enough about those technologies to effectively utilize them.  For instance, after 4 days of watching #dma10 on my TweetDeck, my column is not even completely filled with tweets.*  During SXSW or adTech, I can’t  even keep up with the column.  SOLUTION: Start pushing your membership values to interactive agencies and emerging technology companies.  Get your membership brands involved to drive the point home.  Also, start recruiting rising stars into the DMA organization.

4)   Fix the Keynote: Last year you had Martha Stewart and this year you had Bret Michaels as your keynote.**  Why?  Keynotes are typically nothing great, but it helps a show to at least headline it with someone relevant.  I didn’t find Martha relevant at all as she just spoke about her puppies and family for 45 minutes.  As for Michaels, I’m glad he has reinvented himself, but does anyone really care about his keynote at a DMA event?  SOLUTION: You had Gary Vaynerchuk, Jeff Hayzlett & Marian Salzmann for your closing remarks.  Make one of them your headliner!  They’ve all mastered the new ways of direct marketing.

5)   Embrace Change & Hustle: In today’s marketing world, it’s survival of the fittest.

*Column is 125 posts.

**Keynote was supposed to be James Cameron, but he backed out at the last minute.

Last week several pieces came about physical media dying off, the Roku box in killing cable TV & Blockbuster filing for Chapter 11.   I’ve long been considering a transformation to a no cable household that streams only the media I want and does so when I want it.  I’ve been piecemealing this system over the past year…a PS3 here, a HuluPlus subscription there and so on.  For the past two years, I’ve invested a whole $21.95* in physical media because since the HD format wars began I have had no interest in committing to content on a format that I may have to repurchase at a later date.  I also travel a lot, so I want my media to be easily accessible to me wherever I go.

I put together a spreadsheet that breaks down my traditional costs versus my new costs.  I will save nearly $1,000 a year using the new system (downloadable spreadsheet below). Aside from saving mucho dinero, I’ve also learned in the process that 1) the NFL owns the cable industry and 2) that women just really don’t like learning about technology.  Here’s why…

Cable Industry & the NFL

The cable industry (Comcast, DirecTV, Time Warner, Cox) better get busy adapting or get busy dying.  The NFL as a whole is just a rockstar.  Their entire business model and popularity is like genius on repeat, and they have a legal monopoly to boot.  The NFL doesn’t care a lick about ticket sales.  They care about TV, licensing and advertising revenue. Total ticket sales for all 32 NFL teams are down for the 3^rd straight year and currently make-up just over $1.5 billion in revenue**.  Current TV contracts for the rights to broadcast NFL games is in excess of $20 billion dollars.  The NFL on TV is for the fans, and the NFL stadiums are for the corporations.

After putting together this spreadsheet, I realized that there are only 3 reasons that I still pay DirecTV for service.  The NFL, HBO and Showtime are those reasons.  As much as I love True Blood, Dexter, Treme, Californication and Weeds, I could honestly live without HBO and Showtime.  They’re both testing on-demand models now similar to HuluPlus, so I’ll be good when that happens.  But, I don’t think I could go without seeing the New Orleans Saints on Sunday.  The only way I can watch them living in Atlanta is by having NFL Sunday Ticket via DirecTV***.  This may not hold me much longer either because using NFL GameAccess, I can watch the game in its entirety commercial free online as soon as the final whistle to the live game blows.  If I’ve waited 165 hours since the previous Sunday’s game, then what are 3 more?

Women (and Casual Users)

The ladies will be key.  Men will be the early adopters of all of this streaming technology, but they won’t drive the market the way that women will.  When women start demanding it, then it will be the real deal. Case and point: growth of Ninetendo Wii versus Playstation 3.

Once a household is developed, women pretty much rule the roost regardless of what my male friends and me tell you.  Marketers, brands and ad agencies all know it.  I’ve been married for a whopping 18 months, but I learned quickly that if she isn’t happy then no one is happy.  Which means I can have whomever I wish for a content provider, but it better have The Bachelor Pad and Dancing with the Stars available for her to watch.

As far as adapting to technology goes, women are every bit as capable as men are of adapting to it.  They just don’t care.  Their inner desire to learn about it is what is lacking.  By and large, their attitude is A) will it make my life easier? and B) show me how to use it.

My mentality on new technology such as GoogleTV is the same as my wife’s is about buying a new pair of Prada sandals.  Which is, “Oh it’s new! I can’t wait to try it to see how it integrates with my other accessories and paraphernalia!  I hope I can get a good deal on it too!  If not, I still need it!”

Her mentality on new technology is the same as mine is about buying new shoes, which is, “There are too many options, and will they accomplish what I want when I want with relatively little to no effort?”

It’s just the way it is.  If you want to jump down my throat on the generalization about women in tech, check out this post and this post saying the same thing.

Anyway…

Which new media methods, devices and gizmos that you are trying out?  What do you think the future of media will look like?

Copy of my worksheet: Entertainment Expense Worksheet

*Fight Club on BluRay

**(Average ticket sales per game=65,000 * Number of Home Games=10)*(Number of NFL Teams=32)*(Average Ticket Price for 2010=76.47)

***I didn’t recommend it in my spreadsheet, but I could simply get a Slingbox.  This would add $200 to my hardware costs, and I’d give a family member or a friend so much per month to cover their subscription costs.  I could then watch all NFL, HBO and SHO.

Last week, I attended Merkle’s impressive CRM Super Bowl (aka CRM Executive Summit) in SoBe.  Having worked with Merkle for just over a year now, I am always impressed with the strategies and tools they bring to the table for their clients.

2 common themes peppered throughout the conference were that this is the year that mobile and SaaS CRM platforms will take off.  Barry Judge, CMO of Best Buy, emphasized that the next 12 months would be the time that mobile hit.  I feel like I’ve heard that line for at least the past seven years.  With 2+ million iPads sold, the new iPhone 4, increased Android (Froyo) handsets and the upcoming release of Blackberry OS 6, it’s hard not to be wide-eyed at all the potential money making opportunities in mobile; however, there is still too much fragmentation amongst the market to scale at the level experts preach mobile hitting.  I don’t think 2010 will be the year mobile CRM climaxes…not even close.

SaaS CRM platforms are out in full force (I work for SaaS provider Dukky).   It really is amazing to see how the cloud has allowed companies to focus on niche CRM SaaS platforms.   Brands are starting to become more comfortable with having their valuable data run on the cloud enabling them to cash in on the speed and flexibility of running on the cloud.  Just look at the recent news about Enterprise 2.0 company Jive.

The next big thing will be technology that allows brands to channel all of this data into a few measurable and useful results.  It’s uncanny that we have all this individual user data, but brands are still marketing to them as mass demographics.  I don’t think the 30-second spot is dead (or the other traditional formats); but the decision makers are in denial about their business models.  Agencies and consultancies that focus on this change are going to be the Mad Men of the new generation.

Thoughts?

I’ve been intrigued with History Channel’s recent product America: The Story of Us. Last night, I caught up with my DVR to watch Episode 6 (Heartland).  One entrepreneurial story covered was that of R.W. Sears.  It obviously struck me from an entrepreneurial aspect; but it really dawned on me that in the 100+ years of advertising & direct response marketing innovations we have undergone, we are in the exact same spot from which we began in the 1870s.  The quick story on Sears:

Once the four standard time zones were created (reduced from 8,000!), Sears bought a handful of unwanted pocket watches and through the use of Morse Code sold them to other train station attendants using the trains to make deliveries.  The next year he expanded his product offerings by getting products to farmers and their families in the Midwest that had limited access to stores for products such as bicycles, sewing machines and even automobiles.  At its maximum, the catalog was over 700 pages!  People ordered what they needed and received it in a relatively timely manner.  Less than 20 years later, he was fulfilling 30,000+ orders per day.

So how have we not evolved in over 100 years of direct marketing?

Big brands are freaking out and having to work harder than ever for customer loyalty because customers are back in control with word-of-mouth discourse that can be released to thousands of people on impulse.  That impulse is very real and very measurable. Customers tell brands what they want and not the other way around.  When I think about it, the time of Mad Men (1950s) to let’s say 2000 were really an anomaly in our nation’s history with regards to advertisements.  Brands used to push and tell people what is popular.  The people are back in control of their buying habits.

The only difference between now and the 1870’s is that the scope of access has dramatically increased.  I can now go to Google to find my favorite sewing machine* at the lowest price and then virtually truck on over to Facebook to instantly discuss my potential purchase with thousands of my sewing buddies*.  Relatively soon, I will use my Android-based GoogleTV to purchase my favorite advertised sewing machine* (based on my Facebook viewing habits) at its lowest price in the middle of my favorite History Channel show.

*Disclaimer: I do not sew!  That is all.

An acquaintance of mine, Josh Martin, today asked, “What is Twitter’s future?”

It’s a question that has been asked many times and answered many ways over the past 15 months or so.  Many who attended SXSW this year were hoping for some earth-shattering insight into Twitter’s next big thing and were largely underwhelmed with the announcement of @anywhere.

Here are 3 future areas of development I see for Twitter:

TwitterSense: I’m more anxious to see Twitter release and ad revenue model similar to that of Google’s AdSense.  Many 3^rd party apps such as HootSuite are already doing this, but I bet stakeholders in Twitter are dying for a piece of this action.

Loyalty Marketing: An area being severely overlooked in my eyes as I see many opportunities to tie dollars back to loyalty marketing campaigns.  @CoTweet, which was recently acquired by @ExactTarget, has the right model.  Who will adapt it for the loyalty marketing space?  With my company, Dukky, our clients’ offers are shared across Facebook 3 times more than Twitter; but Twitter redeems at 10 times the rate of Facebook.

B2B Twitter: This is CoTweet’s bread and butter; but no one has really pushed the boundaries of selling internal business Twitter technologies.  For instance, at tech conference all of us geeks go to town with our hash tags to communicate; but do people really efficiently utilize this in other industries such as healthcare or industrial machines?

These are a just a few future growth areas I see for Twitter.  What do you see?

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

*Almost 20% of game-playing respondents to an In-Stat consumer survey report downloading games from Internet sites other than their mobile carrier’s site.
*Of the 2,000 respondents, 29.5% reported playing games on their mobile handsets.
*In-Stat predicts the global mobile gaming market will top $6.8 billion by 2013.

Source: Cellular News

Stats surrounding mobile advertising are always out of this world because no one really has a clue where it’s going to go.   My curiosity runs high in this market because, like everyone else, I see so much potential.  However, like several other advertising mediums, it lacks a standard structure.

Google’s Android is about to release on the T-Mobile G1 in an attempt to compete with the iPhone.  Right now, a ton of money exists in the application market, but it is subsidized by user-purchases not advertising.  However, only 20% of cell phone users use smart phones (Blackberry, Android, iPhone), so how do companies capitalize on the rest of the market aside from ringtones, SMS and MMS?

What do you see as the next big step in mobile advertising?

Microsoft’s ego is so large that they fail to acknowledge the principles that have helped make Apple a successful lifestyle products company and are increasingly losing market share in the computer space.  Since Steve Jobs has come on board, he has shown Apple as a simple design company by using young and fresh technology, and their ads have always reflected this.  Microsoft’s new Vista strategy is to do the opposite with a 54-year old comedian.  Really?

I have always loved Seinfeld and Apple.  I don’t hate Microsoft at all, but I feel as though the only reason I keep a copy of their OS (Windows) on my MacBook Pro is because I have to do so, and I rarely use it.  I assume that most Windows users feel the same.  More and more people are asking me if they can buy a Mac and still do “A, B or C” on the Mac like they do Windows.  95% of the time, I answer, “Yes.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgCG7PqwQF0

Since Apple switched from Apple Computer, they have run their “Windows versus Mac” ads that use Justin Long to illustrate Leopard’s superiority over Windows.  Apple has always had a high cool factor, but the ads are genius because they bring the idea of switching to consumers in a simple fashion.

Microsoft wants to attract a new generation of users by targeting young people.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is about to unveil a “Seinfeld Campus Tour” around the country where Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates do a series of commercials.   Seinfeld is one of the most popular celebrities in the world, but his show ended in 1998; and although you can find it on TBS every night, I don’t see him as the cool person to help Microsoft push their latest message.

College is a time when most kids go nuts and discover new things.  Listening to parents is not a commonly practiced pastime of college students and that seems the premise behind the campaign.  I have a feeling the next generation of Apple ads will be about Apple making fun of Microsoft ads being irrelevant.