BBC Becomes Apple’s Promotional Tool
Apple's Promo Department
Anyone who reads the Technology section of the BBC news site will be aware that they are treading very close to the line when it comes to promoting products from companies. Gone are the day of “sticky back plastic” to indicate using Selotape and now the BBC talks constantly of Pod Casts, referring to generic MP3 players as the iPod, websites for your your iPhone and are going nuts with loads of blogs about the new, rather pointless iPad and here, and here, and here and so on.
So why have the BBC, hopefully unwittingly, become the advertising arm of Apple computers?
Two things always stood out for apple
1. When it came to professional media work such as sound or video or graphics, Macs were generally more powerful than windows/intel PCs, with good monitors and so on.
2. For the home, they were far more stylish looking, though very over priced.
However, that is all changed. When Apple bought Emagic/Logic (professional music composition and recording software) they dropped support for Windows. THOUSANDS of people moved over to Steinberg or Mark of the Unicorn. Mac then moved over to Intel chips, levelling the playing field, and generic monitors. The very things that made them uniquely useful faded away and now for the same price as a Mac you can buy a more powerful alternative that you can run Windows or Linux or whatever you want on.
Now they are a company completely reliant on hype, producing products in the messy old horrible way of “if the market does not exist, create it.”
They have gone the way of the rest of the technology sector – solving problems that don’t exist.
I work in the media, mostly composing music for advertising now. I use Internet connectivity and computers for composition and production as part of my day to day business. It is all very cutting edge stuff.
But what do all my clients do when they want to discuss an idea?
They phone me. In the same way as they have done for the 30 plus years I have been working. They use their desk phone with its nice comfortable handset. They sit in their office chair so they can concentrate. They and I take rough notes of the conversation with paper and pencil.
If they do phone me from their over priced iphone in the car, it is to tell me that they will phone me later when they are back at their desk where it is quieter. And these are mostly people in their 20s, the mobile phone generation if you like.
They will buy the over priced new gadgets that the BBC technology deportment have sold out to utterly and completely. And they will use them to their full potential, ummm, sometimes, perhaps.
But when they want the fully immersive, high value, tactile, holistic, 3d, super highspeed, ultra experiencorsized (yes, I did read that word somewhere the other day), touch sensitive, multi-sense, personal communication, fit for the 21st century ….
They will knock on my door. Or give me a ring for the “lite” version.
And we know this because the amount of business miles travelled by car, train and plane has increased, year on year without fail – enormously.
Even the IT industry know this. There is an advert for computer communications where a man and his team in a meeting have forgotten the proposal, and the pigeons fly off to get his computer.
The mad conceit of the advert is that the man has physically gone to the meeting in the first place. Here is a computer company trying to sell a product that allows you to communicate back to your office that you have had to leave because computer communications is a really bad way of presenting a proposal.
Apple have become the embodiment of this hype.
So when the BBC talk about Job’s company and the super hi-tech useless gadgets, they ignore how people actually work, how they NEED to work and just become part of the HUGE advertising machine selling us what we don’t need half the time and can’t afford. And the fact that the talk more about Apple’s incredibly high priced offering more than any of the cheaper competitors is adding insult to injury.
The direct tax funded BBC’s remit it to Educate, Inform and Entertain – not sell on behalf of another company!
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