Good Ad Bad Ad

In which a leading advertising expert picks some of the best and worst around. Mike Court, executive creative director at McCann Erickson, prefers Apple to chocolate on the basis that the former is intelligent and the latter moronic. Interview by Scott Hughes.

Apple

TBWA/ Chiat Day

have been on the backburner for ages, because of terrible results and all sorts of industrial problems. But it seems to me that now, for the first time, they've actually got together some advertising that really chimes with what the brand's about.

I have to say first that I'm an absolute fanatic. That's partly because of my job, but I've taken the decision to have one at home as well. I like the product, and think it makes computing really easy and accessible in a way that, whatever Bill Gates may say, Microsoft doesn't.

The idea of the campaign is that if you're dull, boring and predictable, you'll probably use a PC, but if you're visionary, hip, groovy and fab, you'll opt for . But it doesn't show this hip, groovy user at his . Instead, it takes other icons from the past to show that some people will always be different and inspirational - and says that's what is about.

The film simply cuts from one person to another. It's any mover or shaker, really - anybody who's ever changed anything. And the choices of people are fantastic - some quite obvious, like Gandhi, and some quite lateral, like Alfred Hitchcock and Mick Jagger.

Another thing about it that's brilliant, given 's positioning, is that it's an intelligent commercial; you have to work out what it's saying. It's not about RAMs and pentium processors and all that rubbish - nobody really cares about that. It's corporate attitude advertising, rather than product-based. You just want to know that the machine will do what you want it to.

Galaxy

Grey

This is really old-fashioned advertising. I explained the idea of it to a colleague of mine: this girl, who lives in an apartment block, comes out of her room and props the lift door open, so her visiting friends have to walk up the stairs, giving her time to eat her bar of Galaxy on her own. And the immediate reaction was: "Oh, like you do."

It's obviously a very expensive film: it's well shot, they've built some nice sets, and they've obviously paid a fortune for the music. But it's a criminal waste of a good tune: the soundtrack is "You Do Something To Me", which is one of the great seminal songs.

Basically, it's all completely incredible, with performances that are absolutely cod. It's a good example of how, increasingly in advertising, people attribute this huge scale to things that just aren't important. It's just a chocolate bar. When they started off using the line "Why have cotton, when you can have silk?" - which still features here - it nicely summed up the idea of Galaxy as a personal indulgence, but now it's become this ridiculous piece of advertising hyperbole which has nothing to do with what people think of the actual product. And they're spending millions of pounds on it.

It's a real shame. If one assumes that a group of talented individuals worked on the project, and another group of talented individuals worked on the Galaxy ad, it's really upsetting to think that they could get to such radically different end results. Whereas the work is understated and clever, and requires knowledge from the consumer to make the communication work, Galaxy assumes the consumer is a moron.