I’m a PC, and I Write Blog Entries

by sant0sk1 • 18 years ago

13 16 18 years ago

aneesh• 18 years ago

Matt's right. A "Vista rocks" ad wouldn't be talked about this much. Case in point: see Mojave experiment a month ago -- all Vista, limited success.

Even more than fixing Vista's problems, Microsoft needs to get back mindshare & brand that it has been losing to "cooler" competitors like Apple & Google. Microsoft wants to be talked about. And that takes a lot more guts than saying "Vista rocks". To their credit, they recognize that.

cstejerean• 18 years ago

"Most of the people counting them out aren’t the target audience."

Microsoft kept dismissing people switching to Linux and OS X as not being in their target audience. But I think PG said it best in http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

"Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?

Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years."

Unfortunately I didn't read that essay back in 2005.

http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chd...

jcl• 18 years ago

You can’t simply start making five ads with Jerry Seinfeld, start airing them, decide you don’t like them after a week, film a new ad, and switch the old one out and the new one in within 7 days.

I'm pretty sure you can. Most advertising agencies present multiple options to their clients and variations thereon, so Microsoft likely had half a dozen half-fleshed-out ideas they could have followed in addition to the Seinfeld one. And, yes, producing an ad could take a long time, but it could also take a very short time, depending on what is needed and how much money you are willing to throw at it. Every day, news networks come up with hours of professionally produced graphics, interviews, and reports, with lead times varying from a few days to a matter of minutes.

raganwald• 18 years ago

I think there’s a very good chance that we’re seeing the sort of marketing campaign that will be studied in universities for years to come. I’m not sure which way it will go. It might be looked back upon as the spark that ignited a massive resurgence and a prime example of one of the all time great ad agencies at the peak of their game. Or it might go down as act of hubris on par with Gigli but with ten times the budget

Matt, I think you may be onto something there. Things in front of us always seem bigger than they really are, but when they went from M$10 on Jerry Seinfeld to directly responding to the "I'm a PC" commercials, this went from being another M$300 ad spend to a very high stakes gamble.

When they were doing the Seinfeld thing, it could have been a defensive move. They solidify their support with their core market, and Apple's ads solidify their support with Apple's core market. It stops and further switching, but creates a stable stalemate with Microsoft maintaining huge market share and continuing to farm its customers for upgrade revenue.

But directly responding to the Apple ads changes things. Now it's a kind of winner-take-all strategy. If they succeed, they could reverse the trend and win customers and mind share back. But if they fail, they accelerate the defection and actually get their own customers talking about Apple's advertising!

If Microsoft spends any serious money on this "I'm a PC" series, I don't see this ending in a stable stalemate. One or the other is going to win out. It "I'm a PC" flops, Microsoft looks very, very bad and validates Apple's advertising. Of course, if it succeeds it could undermine everything Apple has worked on and claw back their gains.

So... I would have to say that before canning Jerry this was not going to be a B-School case study. But now that the #1 player with 90+% of the market is breaking all the rules by referencing a competitor's advertising...

Yeah, I see this as a B-School case study no matter how it plays out.

yaj• 18 years ago

The new ads by Microsoft are good.

What will be better is how Apple will respond to the ads.

unalone4• 18 years ago

It's not exactly fair to call John Gruber a "Mac fanboy" and dismiss him at that. He's got a point with his postings: Microsoft touted Seinfeld for a LONG time and then dropped him after two weeks. They announced this not from the ad firm they hired but from their PR department, which is indicative of the fact that this wasn't a decision straight from the firm. That all leads to the conclusion that Microsoft is slightly panicking. Considering how adamant Gruber is AGAINST things that Apple does that he DOESN'T like, I think it's fair to say that he has a reputation for being fair-minded. And, you know, if a ton of fair-minded people like one product (Apple), perhaps there's a logic behind their liking it. You never know. It's possible. ;-)

As for your saying that this is good because it can't be understood: I'm going to call BS. Being deliberately vague never works for anybody. The ads WERE understandable (hey, guys, Bill Gates is pretty cool, and we're not a faceless empire!), so your point doesn't quite work, but things that you can't understand are either things you can LEARN to understand or they're poorly done. Simple as that.

mattmaroon3• 18 years ago

Lol. Bill O'Reilly often points out some minor gripe he has with a conservative and uses that to tout how unbiased and moderate his views are. And his viewers lap it up. What you said about Gruber is the same thing.

Which is not to say that I do (or anyone should) simply dismiss his arguments because of that. He is a fanboy, in fact, he's the closest thing to a leader they have. If he told his readers to march on Washington, there'd be a million Priuses (or is it Prii?) with Apple bumper stickers clogging the expressways in every state. I'm truly impressed that he's made such a career out of it, but if you don't think that the fact that most of his income is derived from blogging about how great Apple is taints his views, you're simply and obviously wrong.

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose you were Microsoft, and you made a series of ads, planning the first two and possibly a third to be with Jerry Seinfeld (pending reception of the first two) and the rest with lesser celebrities or none at all. Would you not still hype them up for a couple months beforehand? I mean, you just hired possibly the biggest celebrity in TV history to do your TV ads. You wouldn't be issuing press releases, even if it were just for the first two weeks of a year-long campaign? I would.

So then, suppose they get a highly mixed reception and you continue on with your original plan of switching to the other ones. People start asking you why. What do you tell them?

They answered through their PR department because that's who questions to Microsoft (or any large corporation) go to. The PR department. That's the point of a PR department, to be the liaison between the company and the press.

CPB group's job is not to talk to reporters on Microsoft's behalf, and it would be unusual if they were the ones issuing press releases and statements on Microsoft's behalf.

unalone4• 18 years ago

You used "fanboy" like a negative term when you referred to Gruber. The name has negative connotations. Here you dismiss him again by calling him a "fanboy leader" and generalizing against Apple users and Gruber readers. People read his stuff not because he constantly supports Mac, but because he's a good writer, he finds good links, and he tends to be pretty honest about how he feels. I read him before I was a Mac user, and it was the things that he pointed out that made me certain that I wanted a Mac. I don't think that's fanboyish of him, though: he honestly pointed out interesting stuff, and he never acts with a bias towards Apple, beyond the bias of them working well for him. If Apple does a bad job, he points it out.

I'm not digging your style, I must say. Comparing my point to Bill O'Reilly's style is pretty distorted. My point - that if a lot of smart people are also big Apple people, that Apple may actually be making the best products - is hardly irrational. I don't know why you've got a problem against Apple, or why you like tinting every lens in favor of Microsoft, but it's not pleasant and most of your posts have things in them that seem sneering towards things I genuinely like. Apparently your big web site is also a blog that got famous for being offensive, so that's no big surprise, but at the same time you'll forgive me from finding it a bit immature of you.

You think Microsoft only had three ads planned? You think they dropped only a single ad? Citation? And if they DID overadvertise Seinfeld for only a few ads, I'd say that was a bad move on Microsoft's part.

SwellJoe• 18 years ago

For what it's worth, I worked in television while in college, running the tape machines, and various behind the scenes stuff. From the perspective of TV stations, a new spot can definitely go online within 24 hours (usually less). The actual time is generally already bought and paid for months in advance...but there's always time available for the right price. Anytime you see an ad for a show or movie or event for the station itself (e.g. "Watch Friends every day at 6 and 8 PM"), that is a spot that is for sale, for the right price, until the day the spot runs.

Here's how it worked from a technical perspective ten, or so, years ago, when I worked in the industry:

Ads come in automatically via satellite twice per day, in big batches of 20-40 spots. They are automatically recorded onto a single tape (a computer was put online for this a few weeks before I left the station--it was a different ad distribution company, I believe, and so only a few ads were running off of this system, so I'm not deeply familiar with it, but it was fully automated, with no human intervention required to go from ad network to air). The single tape was then processed by a tape operator (me) onto individual tapes, and labeled with a barcode, for use in the master control automated tape loader. Turnaround time was usually an hour or two from the usual spot feed, and the spots were usually airing by the next day.

When an ad had a mistake, a special feed would be scheduled...sometimes within hours of the mistake being found and the ad producer being notified. A new version of the ad could definitely be online the same day. With the automated computer system, I suspect it could be replaced in minutes.

However, spot production is a somewhat different story. Depending on the size of the production, it could take weeks to schedule all of the pieces to fall into place. That said, with enough money and enough muscle (which Microsoft has in spades), a large scale production could be done in days or even hours.

To put things further into perspective, the station I worked for (WB 39 in Houston) also had a production division, and would occasionally make spots practically in real-time for local advertisers to tie into ongoing events like Rockets games. Adding running commentary of the game to spots, by the usual spokesperson for the company (like Mattress Mac), was a reasonably common practice. If Microsoft really wanted to change directions fast, they could do it. It'd cost them two or three times as much (if they were a normal customer...though their agency may have eaten some of the cost just to keep MS happy through these trying times and the perceived disaster that is the spots they'd already produced), and the agency would have to re-schedule other customers productions (or pay lots of overtime), but it could definitely be done.

agentbleu• 18 years ago

"Opinions seem to be wide-ranging, and of course your day wouldn’t be complete unless you heard mine. "

HAHAHA

webwright• 18 years ago

The ad progress was freakin' brilliant. Bizarre ads got EVERYONE talking about Microsoft again, whether you liked them or not. The followup ads ("I'm a PC") were less remarkable, but people paid attention a lot more because of the initial grabber-ads with Seinfeld.

And, as Arrington said in a post today-- the "I'm a PC" ads made the Mac ads seem less funny and more arrogant. It had a great, "Fuck you, I'm not lame just because I don't use a Mac" quality and I think will nudge people to be proud of using a PC.

FWIW, I use a PC and I generally feel pretty content about it. I paid $400 for a great box on Craigslist. I can play games from time to time. I don't get viruses. My computer doesn't crash/freeze. I've watched my Mac buddies recently have a LOT more frequent hardware issues than I do (tho Apple is admittedly great at dealing with it when it happens).

My computer has no white plastic, no rounded corners, aliased fonts and I love it. :-)

captain-m• 18 years ago

I like Seth Godin's take on the ads:

"[...] Vista and PowerPoint and Microsoft's other core non-game products are largely devoid of personality and are optimized to be sold to organizations that prefer it that way. Microsoft can change this if they want to, but until they do, running ads pretending to be something other than that is a waste of money."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/what-adverti...

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