brave [little] meme

Microsoft’s anti-Mac campaign underhanded, desperate

I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice a growing sense of unease in Microsoft’s latest marketing onslaught on Macs. What stands out for me however is the utter lack of any positive message in the new advertising campaigns, a sign which, at least in politics, often indicates the adoption of last resort tactics.

In the past, even the somewhat transparent and woefully artless “I’m a PC” campaign maintained a primarily positive spin: by concentrating on how the ideal of a PC can be transposed onto everyday people and their lives, Microsoft attempted to evoke a sense of affinity to its platform of choice. Not so, unfortunately, with the latest two marketing salvos.

Take the much talked about “Lauren” advert. In a nutshell, an everyday student is given $1000 to go buy a laptop. After much research she finds Macs too expensive, buys an HP, and keeps the change. Now forget for a second that our student is actually an actor, and that the entire premise of the advert as a real-life experiment is false. The point here is that nowhere in the advert do we get any real information on how good Microsoft’s product is, or what advantages it provides. All we can take home is the message that a non-mac laptop is cheaper.

Of course the advert won’t tell you that the laptop in question is cheap for a reason, but we won’t get into that here. Let’s instead move on to the online banner side of the same advertising campaign, the new “slot machines” ad.

Again, the same message: Macs are expensive. Is that really all Microsoft’s advertising agency can come up with? You would think they might have at least one good thing to say about the product they are supposedly promoting, but no. It seems that, with all the cards on the table, Microsoft has had to resort to misleading price claims (as in claims ignoring total cost of ownership, which is usually lower for Macs) in order to shill its wares.

Here’s hoping that Windows 7 will give Microsoft something real to talk about, because frankly its latest marketing ideas have moved into the realm of true sadness.