Amazon is the latest company to take on Apple’s distinctive advertising style in its own commercials, this time by pitting the iPad Air against Amazon’s 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX using what seems like a thinly veiled parody of Apple’s Jony Ive, who frequently appears in the company’s ads. “This is the magical new iPad Air,” says “Apple’s” British narrator, only to have his vague pronouncements rebutted by a twangy American Kindle proponent at every turn. The Kindle Fire, he explains, has a million more pixels (2560 x 1600 vs. the Air’s 2048 x 1536). It weighs 20 percent less (0.83 pounds vs. 1 pound, though its screen is also around an inch smaller). And — the killing stroke — it’s $ 379 for a 16GB model, compared to Apple’s $ 499. Amazon draws pretty accurately from Apple’s bombastic iPad Air copy here, though it hardly has a monopoly: the Air may be “astonishingly” light, but the Kindle Fire is “startlingly” so.
So far, Microsoft still holds the record for the most aggressive Apple parodies, including one that used Siri’s voice in a recreation of an iPad mini commercial and a quickly removed series of videos that starred apparent parodies of both Jony Ive and the late Steve Jobs. And all of this, arguably, was kicked off by Apple itself with the widely seen “I’m a Mac” ad campaign. As Amazon attacks the Air, Microsoft is still waging an increasingly creative “Scroogled” campaign against Google, playing on everything from privacy fears to the ultracheap Chromebook.
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