"Repurposing actors from classic ads can be a powerful strategy. Who can forget Paul Marcarelli, the actor who played Verizon's "Can You Hear Me Now?" tester from 2001 to 2014, becoming the pitchman for competitor Sprint (now T-Mobile) in 2016? Some may recall actress Clara Peller from Wendy's "Where's The Beef?" commercials later finding beef in Prego spaghetti sauce, much to the burger chain's dismay."
"Although they only ran from 2006 to 2009, the Get a Mac commercials created a powerful distinction between Mac computers and their PC competition. Long portrayed Apple's Mac as hip, cool and relaxed. A suit-clad Hodgman was the PC (offered by many brands). Hodgman's PC was affable but uptight, awkward, and beset with problems like viruses and spyware. His PC character sometimes had an edginess that contrasted with Long's easygoing Mac."
"The Get a Mac ads were well-suited to Apple's overall effort to grow because they continued to leverage a psychological principle, social identity. From the firm's earliest days, Steve Jobs tried to draw a distinction between Apple users and PC users. Apple users were cool and creative. PC users were uncool at best, mindless robots at worst. These weren't just different products, the people who used them were different, too. Social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner"
Repurposing famous ad actors has precedent in advertising, exemplified by Paul Marcarelli switching from Verizon to Sprint and Clara Peller appearing in Prego after her Wendy's fame. Novo Nordisk reunited Justin Long and John Hodgman from the Get a Mac campaign to promote the diabetes drug Ozempic, casting Long as Ozempic and Hodgman as unnamed GLP-1 competitors. The original Get a Mac spots, airing 2006–2009, portrayed Mac users as hip and relaxed versus uptight, problem-prone PC users, contributing to Apple's sales spike. The campaign leveraged social identity theory, drawing sharp distinctions between user groups.
Read at Forbes
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