Microsoft’s latest ad campaign has received a lot of buzz thanks to a reported $300 million budget that included hiring Jerry Seinfeld for $10 million.
While the campaign itself has received a lot of buzz, the ads have been rather terrible. Positioning Gates and Seinfeld together was a really bad idea. Gates is best when he’s talking about his passions, or here.
Microsoft Thinks We’re Idiots
The second of the Gates Seinfeld ads was just ill conceived. The ad put Seinfeld and Gates together with ‘the people,’ Microsoft’s customers, in this case an idiot family.
Microsoft, if that’s how you see your customers then you’re clearly out of touch. The ad above is an insult.
Apple’s ad is turned against Apple.
The latest ad however is very good. They’ve co-opted Apple’s PC meme shifting Apple’s clunky and buggy PC image to a computer user. This could effectively shut apple up. Co-opting the meme gave Microsoft a lot of options for presenting assumably real PC users as at least as cool and functional as the fictional ‘Mac’ character in Apple’s commercials.
Now, with this new advertisement the ‘PC’ caricature will no longer represent the clunky buggy computer metaphor, but it will now represent those ‘real’ people from the Apple ads.
With this change, the Apple ads are the ones that would come off as insulting. They can’t insult PC if PC is a user and no longer a box. This could effectively ‘shut Apple up in terms of it’s current ad campaign.
Apple could bring the meme back to being about a box, but that may be difficult if Microsoft is effective it’s going to be hard to put this cat back in the bag.
See Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” ad here:
Update: I hadn’t seen this image before, but it shows clearly that Microsoft is trying to turn Apple’s PC the box, into PC, the computer user.
Living Critic 