Apple’s fantastically effective “Get a Mac” commercials have entertained us for years now, and they just get better and better. Microsoft has been slow to respond, and when it did start to hit back, it first did so with the amusing-but-confusing Seinfeld commercials. Then the “I’m a PC” campaign started, and today we’re seeing ads claiming 4-year-olds are color-correcting their digital images. Yeeee-eah, OK, a touch unlikely but, what the heck, I’m feeling generous; I’ll let it slide.

By far the most effective commercials recently have featured Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunters,” normal folks who desperately need a new laptop,  and so are charged with the task of going out into the big wide world (which would be Best Buy and the Apple Store, it seems) and finding a machine that meets their needs. The hook? If they find one for under a specific sum, Microsoft will buy it for them.

My fellow TAB writers have covered some of the issues raised by (and in) these ads. Tom Reestman has looked at the wonderful omissions and deflections from the truth they contain (check them out here and here and here) while Charles Moore recently asked whether Apple’s high laptop prices are sustainable in today’s economic climate.

Now, according to a report by BrandIndex and covered in some detail over on AdAge.com, Microsoft’s laptop hunter commercials are starting to pay off. For the first time this year, the perception of value for money that 18- to 34-year-olds have of Apple’s laptops has dropped, while Microsoft has gained ground.

Which is to say, younger consumers are starting to believe that Apple’s MacBook products are poor value for money when compared with Windows-based laptops. This graph from BrandIndex illustrates the shift. (The brown line is Apple hardware, the blue line Windows-based hardware.)

Ouch.

Of particular note is the time period of this perception-shift. As recently as mid-April, Apple’s perception scores were riding high — a lot higher than those for Microsoft, in fact. And then, around the beginning of May — boom! The scores became inverted, and suddenly Microsoft is well ahead.

Ted Marzilli, global managing director for BrandIndex, suggests the change is driven by economic conditions. Put simply, younger people have less money to spend and so choose cheaper alternatives to Apple’s unashamedly expensive hardware.

“Apple did a great job of putting Microsoft on the defensive,” Marzilli told AdAge.com. “It made them look old, stodgy, complicated to use and unhip. But Microsoft has started to hit back, and younger folks are more cost- or value-focused.”

Unhip? Who says that any more? It’s not even actually a word.

Anyway, what about older customers? Aren’t they looking to save money, too? According to BrandIndex, the scores between Apple and Microsoft in the 35- to 49-year-old demographic are virtually identical. So we can conclude that:

1. Older consumers have more money to spend even in the middle of a recession, and/or
2. Older consumers aren’t the slightest bit impressed by the Laptop Hunter commercials.

But can we be sure that it’s Microsoft’s latest ad campaign that has caused such a dramatic shift in the younger market? Marzilli thinks so. “It would be very unusual for Microsoft’s score to be increasing this much and Apple’s to be decreasing without some sort of event driving that, like a major campaign that’s particularly successful,” he toldAdAge.com.

Certainly, then, it appears that Microsoft’s advertising is playing a central role in this little drama. However, in the background, Apple is definitely playing a supporting role, whether it wants to or not.

A Simple Matter of Mathematics

You see, if we assume the younger demographic polled by BrandIndex (a good proportion, say, the 18- to 24-year-olds) are mostly college students with very limited incomes, it becomes painfully clear that in this area, at least, Apple is missing a trick. The cheapest MacBook is just too costly for most young people to afford. Even the nominal decrease in price the entry-level MacBook enjoyed late last year — down to an “affordable” (Jobs’ own word) $999 from $1,099 — simply wasn’t a steep enough drop.

Five hundred or six hundred dollars will buy a Windows-based machine that is more than adequate for carrying out the basics of personal computing. The usual suspects — email, text-editing, web browsing, and simple media-management — are all covered with the software baked in to most versions of Windows. Sure, it won’t be a sleek anodized-aluminum beauty. It’ll weigh about a ton, offer paltry battery life and, after six months of daily use, be about as nimble and quick as continental drift.

But it’s still half the price of an entry-level MacBook, and if the buyer isn’t already tuned in to the advantages (both real or perceived) of owning an Apple computer, the decision is going to be very easily made; $1,000 on a shiny Mac or five hundred bucks on a respectable laptop? The former costs an awful lot of money. The latter leaves plenty of green for added software, peripherals and, of great importance to these young ‘uns, extracurricular activities.

No one needs an ad campaign from Microsoft to work out the economic returns in making that decision, but it certainly appears to be helping.

Yesterday TAB writer Tom Reestman took a shot at Microsoft over their latest attack ad on Mac pricing, and today Apple is defending itself against Redmond’s advances with three new “Get a Mac” ads starring Justin Long and John Hodgman. This time around, Cupertino seem to be responding directly to the Microsoft Laptop Hunters series of ads that feature “regular people” shopping for a new notebook within a certain price range, which inevitably excludes Apple machines. They also take a jab at the “I’m (person’s name), and I’m a PC” tactic Microsoft has been using in all of its recent advertising.

“Customer Care” compares the kind of customer service you get with Apple, and with a PC. Mac has a friendly, nice-looking Genius to give him one-on-one help anytime he needs it, while PC calls up a customer support hotline and is given the runaround. I think this is the farthest Hodgman has ever stretched his acting chops in one of these ads.

In “Elimination,” Apple is pretty clearly responding to Microsoft’s tossed glove. A computer buyer joins the pair on-screen, and PC brings along some friends to offer her a wide range of buying choices. Eventually, though, she eliminates them all based on her search criteria, which almost match that of Lauren and Giampaulo, with one final, key exception. Apple, in giving the customer a very clever last line, gets in a nice parting shot with this ad.

The third and final new ad, “PC Choice Chat,” finds Hodgman hosting a radio talk show, the format of which ostensibly consists of talking to PC users about their variety of choices and options. It ends up following the same lines as the other two commercials, mentioning both Apple’s superior customer service, and its resistance to security threats. Obviously Apple knows its strength and doesn’t feel the need to stray too far from its core message: we’re easier and safer to use.

Good batch overall, and the dig at the end of “Elimination” is priceless.

This morning I noticed a new set of takeover ads on CNN.com. Creating custom Get a Mac ads just for the web has become more common over the past few months, with CNN.com and NYTimes.com getting the most play.

It’s always interesting to see how Apple makes use of the layouts of these sites to really make their ads pop. In the case of this particular run of ads on CNN.com, Apple actually created two “dummy” ads for mortgages and flights. Clicking through either of these takes you to Apple’s Why Mac page.

Here are screenshots, as well as a video of the ads in action.

Ever wonder how being included in one of Apple’s iPhone and App Store ads affects sales? Positively, would be my uninformed guess. And it looks like, in this case at least, my gut feeling is an accurate reflection of reality. A recent blog post by Michael D. Jensen, developer of Analytics App for the iPhone/iPod Touch, reveals specific details behind a sales spike following his app’s appearance in an Apple print ad.

Analytics App, which provides on-the-go access to all of your Google Analytics data via your iPhone or iPod Touch, was recently featured in an ad for Fortune magazine with the tagline “Helping you run your small business, one app at a time.” In total, the ad featured 12 third-party apps (a full page), showing each on the springboard linked to a brief description. For Analytics App, the caption reads: “Want to see how your web site’s performing? Analytics App shows you your site’s unique visitors, page views and other statistics using a series of customizable reports.” The same ad appeared in the Wall Street Journal more recently, and the Analytics App icon showed up in Apple’s “Thanks a billion” celebration ad on the WSJ’s web site, among others.

Image courtesy of Michael D. Jensen

Jensen took a look at his sales figures to work out the effect of the print ad on his revenue. He found that in the week following the appearance of the initial print ad, sales of his app rose an impressive 53 percent over previous weeks. That’s a nice spike, considering the advertising is free (unless you count Apple’s 30 percent cut on every app sold). As Jensen points out, he definitely gets better media presence via Apple than he could ever hope to fund on his own.

Way back in February, Hit Tennis developer Mark Johnson noted a similar spike following the appearance of his app in an iPod Touch TV advertisement. His sales improved a whopping 500 percent, but then dipped back down steadily. It makes sense that TV would have a more significant effect on sales, thanks to its much wider reach.

So, not surprisingly, being backed by Apple publicly lends you some serious street cred. The stat to watch is how it affects sales over the long haul. I’m willing to bet the halo effect is a lot more shortlived than some might expect, and is probably directly tied to the run lifetime of the ad itself.

Not one to be baited into a direct reprisal of Microsoft’s latest “laptop hunter” series of commercials, Apple is firing back in their own way with the release of four new installments of their “Get a Mac” ads. The Get a Mac ads, in case you haven’t seen them (how’s life under that rock, by the way?), star John Hodgman and Justin Long as human representations of a PC and a Mac, respectively. The four new installments are the first to be released since Christmas, when animated versions meant to resemble Rankin/Bass classics like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” came out.

“Biohazard Suit” features Hodgman wearing just that, and Justin Long asking why. The ad targets the vulnerability of Windows systems to viral attack, and though it doesn’t mention it by name, conjures up the recent “Conficker” worm that has infected over 3 million PCs and whose ultimate purpose is not yet clear. Apple is playing it very smart by just repeating in televised form the same arguments Mac users have been using to convince their PC friends to convert for years.

“Legal Copy” has PC claiming to be easy to use, which causes a growing amount of legal copy to appear across the bottom of the screen with each similar additional claim he makes. This one again mentions the virus susceptibility of Windows, and seems to sort of be a response to Microsoft’s recent “I’m a PC and I’m 4 and 1/2″ ad, since it rebuts claims of simplicity.

“Stacks” deals not with the OS X Leopard feature as you might expect from the name, but with PC searching through huge stacks of photos one by one for pictures of his friend, at which point Mac tells him about iPhoto’s new facial recognition features. Personally, I think this is one of the best ads in this series so far, because it emphasizes a positive point about OS X instead of just noting what you won’t get by avoiding Windows. iPhoto’s Faces technology is just the kind of thing that would appeal to most computer users but that people who aren’t regular Apple customers might now know about.

Finally, “Time Traveler” presents a glimpse of Windows’ future. PC travels through time to the year 2150 to see if PCs have finally become as stable and hassle-free as Macs. This causes future PC to freeze, answering the question. This one seems more forward-looking than most, and might be a subtle advance jab against Windows 7.

Honestly, I found this batch fell kind of flat compared with previous episodes in the same series, but at least they’re not just plain misleading like the latest from Redmond.