Getting It Wrong – $300million Wrong

One of the great branding wars of the past 10 years has been the battle for the hearts and minds of home PC users between Microsoft and Apple computers.

Apple, after almost facing corporate collapse in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s clawed their way back into the home PC market by launching range after range of nicely designed, highly attractive and functional desktop PC’s, lap tops and MP3 players which rode the fine line between high end industrial design and computer hardware.

Microsoft, apart from the X-Box doesn’t actually make hardware – it makes software and faces all the problems of companies that sell services – that it’s hard to get passionate about something as benign as a word processing problem, it’s hard to get emotional about an operating system and what type of spread-sheeting or email system you use, when it doesn’t actually define you.

Using an Apple on the other hand does and Apple has exploited this to this hilt – releasing a series of ads which encourage people to believe that using an Apple is a part of who they are.

Apple also focused on user simplicity, functional interfaces and owning the words cool, reliable and useful in the consumers mind.

This week Microsoft responded, finally tired of being defined as what they feel they are not, they released an ad featuring two great brands - Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld and it’s a stinker.

The ad is slow, long and completely pointless.

Microsoft premièred the ad during last Thursday night’s broadcast of the National Football League’s season kickoff game, one of the most watched slots in American TV.

The ad, which is clearly designed to be quirky doesn’t have a direct mention of Microsoft, or Vista or anything until the near the end, instead it focusses on a dialogue about shoes, the final credits simply finish with the Microsoft logo and the strapline “The future, delicious”.

The ad was created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky – a company with apparently deserved of its reputation for oddness.