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The new Zune commercials are shit. (The Zune is Microsoft’s coming iPod rip-off.)

Why are the Zune commercials quite the crappy? Most of them look like a bunch of random “youth” stock footage. Sometimes, at the end, there’s a brief bit about the Zune’s features. The two parts are totally unconnected, but still jammed together, like the balding managers at Microsoft were hoping that the Zune would benefit from the footage’s residual coolness.

The iPod Ads, by comparison, constantly but unintrusively show the product being used. The “silhouette” dancers are brilliant because they make it easy to see yourself as one of them, the energetically cool. Both the iPod and the “cool” are highlighted and combined, with everything else blanked out, so that you form a strong association between the two. That is, “buy an iPod and this’ll be you.” That’s what the best advertising does: it makes you feel incomplete and inferior unless you buy whatever’s being advertised.

In other words, the Zune ads are awkward and clueless—Microsoft getting lost trying to imitate some sort of vaguely indie generic casualness. Apple’s ads actually advertise the iPod.