hyalineskies

Saying that the iPod is ubiquitous would be a gross understatement. Nearly everyone has one; some of us own multiple iPods (I, for instance, own a 60GB 5G, 4GB nano, and 512MB shuffle, but it’s certainly no secret that I’m a complete nerd.) Apple’s iPod is without question the Tyrannosaurus of the digital audio player world, and it’s taken years for makers of alternative devices to remove the wool from their eyes and acknowledge the white earbuds in the ears of the general populace.

Flash memory maker SanDisk, however, has seemingly collected the wool from other vendors for use in its latest interactive marketing campaign, a counterculture, iPod-bashing scheme called iDon’t, which quite literally refers to iPod owners as mindless, consumer-whore sheep. It’s certainly a frontal assault, but iDon’t believe that SanDisk (or SanDisk’s marketing executives) really thought this out before starting one of the worst ad campaigns I’ve seen since the dot-com era.

I can already get an idea of how the iDon’t brainstorming session played out: a bunch of ad agency employees were throwing ideas around when an intern steps in wearing his Che Guevara shirt. “That’s it!” one exclaims. “Let’s fight the iPod! They’re all mindless trend-whores!” And, with that spark, on went the creative fires of multiple advertising employees, throwing around ideas of a socialist revolution.

Unfortunately, there was seemingly no voice of reason in that meeting. I’m no advertising guru by any means, but I remember one counterculture campaign from a rather ironic source in itself: Apple Computer.

Think Different was more than a marketing slogan; it became the mantra of Macintosh users everywhere, from creatives to free-thinkers, from students to the elderly. Think Different didn’t call out Windows users as mindless, trend-whoring sheep with cheap, unreliable, and factory-defective hardware. Think Different built itself around the ideals of independence and self-empowerment, and, thanks to some good industrial design, innovation, and the marketing plan, Apple survived.

With this thought in mind, it seems both crude as well as contradictory that SanDisk even went through with iDon’t. iDon’t took the countercultural method of Apple, stripped the self-empowerment, and added the Anarchist’s Cookbook, resulting in a self-contradictory campaign that outright slams iPod owners - the original counterculture - and alienates itself from the social norm. iDon’t is trying to be the Hot Topic of ad campaigns; it is, instead, the suicidal emo kid that is so socially maladjusted by its own accord that it’s its own fault for being disliked.

To make matters worse, the counterculture that doesn’t want iPods doesn’t want your player anyway. They’re perfectly happy with their “old-school” CD players or alternatives that don’t market themselves as alternatives. Those few that do fit the iDon’t persona are hardly enough to start any anti-trend that SanDisk would hope for.

SanDisk, Cowon, and other “alternative” player OEMs have obviously ignored economics (and, in SanDisk’s case, their demographic; SanDisk et al. are also ignoring user experience. They can fight the device all they want, but they’ve also got to fight the “killer app” that is iTunes.

To date, I have yet to see the alternatives realise that iPod is merely half of the equation: iTunes is the software that completes the iPod user experience. iTunes is not merely a transfer utility; it is the one-stop portal for everything music related on one’s computer on either of the two major OS platforms. iTunes is amazingly solid without iPod. Knock iPod or mimic its abilities all you want, but unless your alternative digital audio player comes with something as beautiful (and as cross-platform) as iTunes, your product is still wildly inferior. For that matter, no alternative music player that I’m aware of has ever tried to hook itself into iTunes and masquerade as an iPod for the ease of killing two birds (the “I don’t have an application as good as iTunes” bird and “This new utility doesn’t allow iPod converts any ease of use” bird) with one stone. Without iTunes or a comparable bundled application, you might as well throw the player itself at these birds, because that’s about all that it’s good for. The user may find your hardware great, but without an easy way to get music on the device, they’re not using it.

To make things worse - and it’s partly Apple’s fault (*cough* good move) - none of the alternatives play AAC DRM-protected music from the iTunes Music Store. Those fed up with the iPod mainstream can’t convert their legal music investments to work on the alternative device, adding even more to the headache (and total cost of ownership) of a device like SanDisk’s. In this case, it would be like running Apple’s Switch campaign without the PC-to-Mac friendliness that made the switch a viable option to begin with. (Did I mention yet another parallel of a SanDisk mistake to an Apple success?)

Let’s go back and recap this idea: half the price minus iTunes, minus compatibility with AAC, minus overall user experience, plus a heaping amount of bleeding-heart, unwarranted teenage angst. Leave Che at home, guys: in a capitalist world, you’re still trying to push an inferior good. iDon’t buy this for one minute, and I’m not sure that a substantial amount of others will, either.