Microsoft Advertising Campain Evokes Nostalgia; Apple Still Catering to Consumers
Thursday night an old friend and NFC East football foe were watching the Washington Redskins and the New York Giants kick off the 2008 NFL season. We watched the contest at my neighborhood pub, St. Stephen’s Green, where the background conversation overshadowed the match’s in-game commentary. During one of the commercial interruptions I glanced at the screen and noticed comedian Jerry Seinfeld and philanthropist Bill Gates eating churros and trying on shoes. Unable to hear their conversation, the purpose of the commercial puzzled me until the Windows logo briefly flashed at the end of the commercial. Intrigued by two icons I envied during the nineties, I sifted through the internet to discover where Microsoft was heading with their commercials. After watching the advertisement online later that night, I found a conversation started by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch about the advertising campaign in an article titled Microsoft Ads: First Phase To “Engage Consumers, Spark Conversation”. Arrington, and other vocal leaders of the tech web, feel that the commercial was confusing and not funny. Arrington continues to say that the advertisement is“[...]mostly content free, with just one mention of Microsoft near the end. It’s a far cry from the brilliant Microsoft v. mac ads that Apple has run over the years.”
It was the mission for “a computer on every desktop and in every home” that allowed Windows to take its stake as the dominant operating system on home computers. Most of us, including the Apple-biased Michael Arrington, have spent considerable time using Microsoft’s operating systems on IBM-cloned personal computers over the past twenty five years. The new Microsoft campaign will not pit Windows versus OSX, but will nostalgicly remind its customers how Windows has changed their lives over the past two and a half decades. As Bill Veghte, Senior Vice President, Online Services & Windows Business Group at Microsoft states, “The first phase of this campaign is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity.”
I personally found the commercial to be filled with Jerry Seinfeld’s signature observational comedy with a hint of subtle humor. I find it particularly humorus that Bill Gates; one of the world’s wealthiest men, is shopping in a discount shoe store. It goes against our perception of the world elite who have staffs to handle such menial tasks, but here is Bill Gates being fit for new shoes in a store where he has been a long-time loyal customer. In addition, the use of Gates’ signature mugshot as the picture for his Shoe Circus Clown Club membership card is absolutely priceless. This demonstrates the humility that is Bill Gates.
On the contrary, I feel that Apple’s advertising campaign showcases their consumer-focused products and encourages their loyal fanbase to purchase each new-generation iPod, iPhone and iMac as they are updated. These commercials cater to a distinct subset of the American consumer that watch frequent Steve Jobs keynote addresses and read the weblog of a self-proclaimed “member of the cult of iPhone”. It is Arrington’s right to be biased towards one product over another, but it impedes his objective judgment on Apple’s advertising campaign. As one of Arrington’s readers, @TCCritic states;
The Apple ads are funny but they don’t appeal to the masses. They create lots of noise but they by now alienate people more than anything else. They’re about being sophisticated and “better” than someone else. But the average person in Ohio or Texas doesn’t necessarily want to be walking around with a hip iPhone. He or she is probably closer to the PC boy and hates the fact that like in high-school, they’re referred to as nerds. Most people don’t want to feel that they’re better than other people but that’s all that the Apple ads are about. Funny enough, Apple Macs are primarily used by geeks who want to think they’re not geeks. So Apple comes around and tells them, you’re not geeks, you’re cool. And then they buy a Mac or an iPhone.
Apple’s advertising campaign works tremendously well when the economy is booming because there are a higher percentage of consumers with disposable income to buy new hardware every six months. But rising energy costs and an economic hangover from last year’s subprime mortgage fallout, has lead to unemplyment exceeding 6.1% and the percentage of consumers who have disposable income to spend on flashy Apple hardware is diminishing. Those hardest hit by our current economic state are suburban and rural Americans who fled dense urban areas in the 1970s because of rising crime rates, desegregation, and the near-completion of an interstate highway system that funneled homeowners to cheap and abundant housing. Left without the benefit of dense housing patterns, high concentration of jobs and well-developed public transportation systems, these Americans are at an exponentially higher risk of limited disposable income due to rising energy prices than their fellow Americans living on the East and West coasts. And when these Americans have to stretch already limited funds to feed and furnish their families, it is unlikely that he will rush to purchased the Apple-du-jour.
Only time will tell if the new Windows advertising campaign will succeed or fail but I am enouraged to see how well Bill Gates has mind-melded his magnum Jupiter brain into those other Saturn-ring brains at Microsoft.
Posted on September 6th, 2008 | By: bootstrap economist | Filed under Web Technologies
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