If you're of a certain age and you appreciate great marketing, you will almost certainly remember Apple's "Get a Mac" advertising campaign.
Created by TBWA\Media Arts Lab, Apple's ad agency at the time, the campaign ran from 2006 to 2009 and featured actors John Hodgman and Justin Long in an astounding number of creative executions.
The ads all followed the same format: against a plain white backdrop, a casual, cool-looking man dressed introduced himself as an Apple Macintosh computer ("Hello, I'm a Mac.") and a more formal, notably less-cool-looking man in a bad suit introduces himself as a Microsoft Windows personal computer ("And I'm a PC.").
The ads would then proceed to highlight a great Apple feature, a ridiculous Windows flaw, or sometimes, one of each. In each ad, PC was portrayed as odd, oafish, and not always so bright... but Apple was consistently friendly and polite to his obviously inferior friend.
Well, now it's Apple's turn to seem oafishly inferior, courtesy of rival phone maker Google.
The series, which you can watch below, is titled "Best Phones Forever" and takes a page right out of Apple's award-winning advertising playbook by putting what is clearly intended to be an iPhone (despite the absence of the Apple logo) next to Google's latest Pixel.
I won't ruin all of the inside jokes stuffed into each of these ads by listing them here.
Suffice it to say, there are a lot of them.
And in each ad, Google ends up looking much, much better than the alternative.
That's very common for comparative advertising. It's the definition of it, in fact.
But I'd challenge you to find another comparative ad campaign in recent memory where the clearly superior product is so friendly to its rival.
Best Phones Forever indeed.