Am I one of the few people on the planet who actually liked the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld advertisements from Microsoft? Judging by the multitude of schadenfreude-laden obituaries for the campaign, I’d say the answer is yes.
Were they really that bad? I didn’t think so. I saw the company trying to highlight its brand in a new light, using humor and its famous founding personality. I’ve never met Bill Gates before, but he does have a funny, self-depreciating side, which I first observed earlier this year in his retirement video. The Seinfeld ads successfully brought out this side of Gates, and also attempted to associate those good feelings with the Microsoft brand. They were funny, and they stayed away from hyped-up product claims. Seems like a pretty smart package to me.
For reasons that would take too long to explore here, Microsoft is a company that critics love to hate. I think that any official effort to make Microsoft look good is bound to be treated with suspicion and outright hostility. This attitude is understandable for anyone that has been burned by the company before, but I also feel that people have to make an effort to judge individual efforts on their own merits, rather than automatically sullying them because of past experiences.
In many ways, Apple Inc. is already a giant. Its US$118 billion market cap, which briefly surpassed Google Inc.’s this year, is larger than that of Hewlett-Packard Co. Its sales, which are nearly $31 billion a year, have grown almost 40 per cent annually the past five years. And, then there’s its mindshare with the general public.
Still, Macs remain a small, albeit fast-growing, portion of the overall PC market. In the U.S., Windows PCs account for 11 out of 12 new computers sold in the most recent quarter, according to Gartner Inc. and IDC Corp.
That fact that Microsoft remains the elephant and Apple the mouse accounts for why in the second, Jerry Seinfeld-free phase of the Windows ad campaign, Microsoft will continue to tiptoe around its smaller tormentor.
“It’s Marketing 101. It clearly makes sense for the No. 2 guy to pick a fight with the No. 1 guy,” said Eric Hollreiser, director of corporate communications for Microsoft. But with its ad counterattack, Microsoft does not need to spend too much time on Apple, he said. “There were some pervasive misperceptions that we needed to address. It’s unmistakeable that we will focus on them. But we will quickly pivot to the positive values of Windows.”
Why not return the favour and go after Apple for its recent problems launching MobileMe and iPhone 2.0, or the way it closely guards its technology?
Hollresier says Microsoft would rather get that message across subtly, through things such as its slogan, “Windows. Not Walls,” which “provides differentiation.”
“We wanted to talk about us, [and] have people hear what we have to say about Windows, not what we say about competitors,” Hollreiser said.
The closest Microsoft will come to mentioning the ‘A’ word is at the beginning of the new ad, when a Microsoft employee, “Sean,” who resembles the PC guy played by actor John Hodgman in Apple’s ads, will say, “I’m a PC, and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”
The 60-second commercial will air during NBC’s The Office. A Web video version will be made available on YouTube and on Microsoft’s marketing Web site at that time.
A preview version showed celebrities including author Deepak Chopra, actress Eva Longoria (and husband basketball player Tony Parker), and other accomplished but less famous notables talking about why they “are a PC.”
The ad shows a wide range of people: a graffiti artist, an Obama blogger, a McCain broadcaster, a scuba diver in a shark cage, an astronaut, and a grizzled commercial fisherman.
