Michael Jackson Made Me Buy A Mac

Seems obligatory to have some kind of Michael Jackson post following the King of Pop's untimely passing. Guess we'll follow the herd and put ours up, fashionably late. So here it is, related right back to marketing and advertising.

Everyone of a certain generation remembers huddling around MTV when they actually played music videos anxiously waiting for the hourly airing of Thriller. And every guy who grew up in the hair-band era remembers how cool it was that Eddie Van Halen was playing guitar on the Beat It track while hoping he wasn't going to dance in the video because ... well, that wouldn't be very Van Halen-ish of him.

I remember all those things, but what I remember most is that MJ enticed me - practically forced me - to buy my first Mac.

Seems like yesterday. I was walking home from work in Manhattan where I lived at the time. Ducked into an electronics store and there it was. The first generation iMac. Shiny. With a subwoofer. On a pedestal. Blasting ... blaring ... Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal.

Sounds lame now, but at the time this kind of in-store product promotion was unheard of. A computer was something that sat lifelessly on a long shelf of nearly identical off-white plastic casings with a lame sticker on the monitor coldly stating performance statistics like how many gigahoozies were inside.

But the iMac. It was ... well, cool. Everyone in the store had to pass by it. Twice. Everyone stared at it like it was from outer space. Because it practically was. And in unison, we all nodded our heads as it faithfully cranked ... boomed ... Smooth Criminal again and again. We couldn't get enough. And suddenly we all were thinking how great it would be to be moonwalking to Smooth Criminal in our very own tiny New York apartments on our very own iMac.

Like I'm sure a lot of others did, I stopped by the store again the next day, picked up their catalog (Interwhat?) and made what would become the first of many Mac purchases. As soon as I could figure out how to get Napster to work, I was living the sweet life we all envisioned that day in the store, this time with MJ's music filling the corners of my shoebox-sized, ridiculously-priced apartment. Funny, it still sounded pretty good at home, but nothing like it did that day we all decided we had to have that computer and that song. Amazing how much the environment can change a marginal song into a masterpiece.

Either way, moonwalk in peace, Michael.