Ad of the Day: Apple

Anything you can do, I can do better—or at least as well. And I'll take up less room doing it.

Apple released its second and third TV spots for the iPad mini on Sunday. Following the earlier dual-piano spot, the new ads show off the newer and more diminutive Apple tablet as an e-book reader and photo viewer—functions that might presumably feel like trouble points to anyone wondering if the smaller, 7.9-inch screen is limiting in any way.

Not in these ads it isn't. "Photos" gets its point across quite literally through the music—"Two of a Kind" by Bobby Darin and Johnny Mercer—as we see a regular iPad and an iPad mini sitting side by side. Through the course of the spot, the familiar disembodied hands load and manipulate photos on both tablets, linking the images together to form the kind of simple and delightful visuals for which Apple ads are well known. The second spot, "Books," likewise pairs a regular iPad and an iPad mini, this time both with e-bookshelves loaded up. The devices open pairs of books whose titles are in some way counterbalancing: The Sun Also Rises and The Valley of the Moon; East of Eden and How the West Was Won; Moby Dick and Gone Fishing. The message couldn't be simpler: The mini runs the same apps in the same way as the regular iPad, and looks just as great doing so.

These spots are funny, though. Usually, comparison ads rate a product against a competitor's device, not against one from the same brand. Since we're more familiar with the former setup, subconsciously we tend to expect the Apple spots to tell us which product is better. But of course, they don't—the products are equally good, the ads say. (They leave it up to you to decide which fits your needs more effectively.) The effect of this lightly jarring realization is to reinforce the sense that there's something special about these machines—they're special enough, anyway, to be unexpected even in the advertising.

And there's a simpler gut reaction, too. Comparing oneself to oneself is super arrogant, even solipsistic. And yet, in these spots, it works. Of course they leave out the competition. Through comparison demos of two of its own products, Apple leaves viewers with the lingering sense that the iPad is actually beyond compare.