The tiny, unborn marketing guy inside me wanted to pitch this TV ad campaign to you all. Enjoy.
Opening montage of jerky, choppy cuts of jjohn typing on laptop from different, improbably (and somewhat impolite) angles; Heavily fuzzed-up guitar music featuring dramatic whammy bar dives and tremolos accompanies images
James Earl Jones Voice Over: Joe Johnston is a professional Perl programmer and UNIX hack. Co-author of several, er, selling technical books, Joe knows latops.
Cut to headshot of jjohn with spiky, “bedhead” hair
JJ: Hola, Dudes and Dudettes! When I’m banging out mod_perl scripts at 3AM or jamming out a new tech article, the last thing I need is for the dollar key on my laptop to go tits up.
Cut to jjohn’s horror-filled reaction as his keyboard stops working;
Guitar plays “out of luck” notes; Cut to jerky, handcam closeup of jjohnJJ: That’s why I only use IBM ThinkPad (™) laptops.
Every ThinkPad (™) features outrageous Pentium processing power backed by reliable IBM hardware and support. Each ThinkPad (™) comes in a sick black chassis build with a radical fire-engine red nipplemouse and an awesome LCD screen. Dude! It’s even got it’s own battery!
Cut to the most iconoclastic, pouting teenaged girl you can imagine foddling laptop in front of her pink babydoll t-shirt that sports an oversized white star emblem; Cut back to jjohn
JJ: Best of all, you can put any damn operating system on it you want! Sure it comes with Microsoft Windows, but this bitch purrs under Linux, FreeBSD, even BeOS!
jjohn holds laptop like a guitar, sticks tongue out and pretends to play along with shedding metal guitar in foreground; cut back to closeup
JJ: Don’t let your power cord go limp and flaccid while you’re stepping through the debugger! Get a IBM ThinkPad (™) today!
Pouting girl enters from stage left; Looks at jjohn’s laptop
Pouting Iconoclast: Nice laptop, I guess.
jjohn smiles smuggly; winks to camera
JJ: Baby, you said a mouthful!
Legalese writing appears in unreadably small lettering while voice over reads lines at top speed
VO: Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. BeOS is a registered trademark of Palm, Inc. Linux and FreeBSD aren’t trademarks at all. Under certain conditions, IBM ThinkPads (™) may fail to attract desirable members of the opposite sex. Your mileage may vary. Offer void where prohibited. Use only as directed. See you primary care physician before using. IBM ThinkPads (™) should not be used by gravid women (or gravid men).
DO NOT TAUNT IBM ThinkPads (™)
Say, that was fun! If you want to hear more of my great marketing ideas, have your people talk to my people (inside my head).
UPDATE: Try this product on for size: IBM ThinkPad (™) Condoms: When the hacking’s done; the humping’s begun.