Another good one: https://youtu.be/GyY15Jkkg2A

Came here to mention Ekman. I do CG facial animation for a living, and his work is one of the bibles of the craft. As a side effect, you learn too much about facial features and expressions, and you can read people through micro-expressions and subconscious communications which is a double edged sword. It's pretty dumbed down, but the show "Lie to Me" shows a lot of this.

yeah true people like to cheer for an underdog. nobody cheers for goliath lol

PC isn't really a brand though. And as someone else mentioned, this sort of ad works best when you're clearly number 2 in a two horse race, such as coke and pepsi or in the 90s Nintendo Vs Sega.

>A side note though, if you are the category leader, like say Coke over Pepsi -- you NEVER, ever mention your competitor. You are the champ, they are nothing to you, you don't mention them,

Yup. I can't remember any Coca-Cola commercials with Pepsi even hinted at. At the same time, Pepsi has had tons directly aimed at Coke. Anyone remember the Pepsi Challenge campaigns?

I believe this strategy of “name-dropping your competition” came around in the 80s-90s. Just like commercials with talking animals. It’s a polarizing approach. Some people love it and some hate it. But some brands can do it really well and some just come across as bitter.

"im a pc and im a mac" some people resonate more with brands that are willing to call out the competition. i dont think its always the right or wrong thing to do. just depends on the product/target market/etc

They also call out “leading brand” to obfuscate who they are comparing their product to.

Harbor Freight did (does?) this with their Hercules brand or Bauer brands (forget which). The comparison images on the package make you think they’re comparing them to Dewalt or Milwaukee. However, if you read the fine print, they’re actually comparing to their other low-end in-house brand.

Edit: https://youtu.be/3ZfYF9aIO7U?t=2467

(language warning, dude's pretty foul-mouthed).

"Leading Brand" is ever-evolving, and some people will see the leading brand as something different.

Naming a brand specifically means you are stuck with a concrete reference point.

In your example of Miller Lite, if I don't like Michelob, comparing something to it isn't going to do anything for me. But comparing it to the 'leading brand' means you might be better than my preferred brand.

They give out tours as you're the secret ingredient.

Trump wouldn’t stop talking about his opponents. This is a terrible example.

Why spend money on ad time, and then give publicity to your competitors? Even if it's a negative comparison, you're still mentioning their name and helping their brand awareness.

Many items are pretty much equal to others they are competing against. So they will compare themselves to some weird off brand that watered down, cheap crap to say, we're soooooo much better than this leading brand... Its kind of a strawman argument.

It's just because it...kind of just is pronounced that way. English is a mess of inconsistency.

If you start digging at one weird or contradictory spelling or pronunciation you'll never stop.

I find that the majority of native speakers almost use the language kind of instinctively?...without really understanding the 'rules' as such.

I'm sure someone cleverer than me will be able to explain the rules surrounding that particular pronunciation.

Just be aware that most of the 'rules' contradict themselves frequently.

🤷🏻 English 🤷🏻

Edit: Add to this the broad range of English dialects and accents (even just across England), many of us pronounce the same words quite differently.

> Pepsi will say its better than coke

Probably my favorite ad in recent years for how sneakily it does this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD37_EHRXXE

[removed]

A short advertisment

Woman was originally spelled wifmann, from wif meaning "female" and mann meaning "person". The f eventually became an m, making wimmann.

Wif was pronounced "weef". The "ee" vowel is pronounced close to the front of the mouth. Over the centuries, the pronunciation of wimman changed, the vowel moving farther back in the mouth from an "ee" to an "ih" (as in "little"), then farther back to an "ooh" (as in "book").

The reason it's not pronounced with an "aww" (as in "yawn") or an "ahh" (as in "thought") is that these vowels are made even farther back in the mouth, close to the throat. They're also made with the mouth farther open than "ee", "ih", or "ooh". The vowel may have drifted from "ee" over the centuries, but it did not drift far enough to reach "ahh".

Warshington DC

It used to be pronounced the way we pronounce "women", but supposedly the W sound affected the singular woman to sound more like the vowel in "wool" than "will".

Why does it be the vowel in "wool" and not the vowel in "cough"? I've only ever seen the W sound explanation about its pronunciation, but the vowel in "will" be "wool" are pronounced in similar places of the mouths (similar "closed-ness" of the mouth), so it might have been a small move from one sound to another.

I believe they may be using a non-rhotic dialect. Not all Englishes pronounce that R. I beleive they're asking why the vowel in "wo" is the vowel in "book" instead of the vowel in "god".

Because there is no R. War has an 'r' in it, which makes the "rrr" sound at the end. Woman consists of 'wo' and "man", so that's how you pronounce it.

There are a lot of weird and inconsistent words in the English language. This is not one of them.

[removed]

[removed]

I think Miller Lite got in trouble a few years back, for running an ad campaign warning that competitors contained GHT. This was just a joke about how they spelled light, but they were forced to pull the commercials.