Just in case anyone thought things couldn't get any worse for Microsoft

Sep 24, 2008 18:51 GMT  ·  By

In what looks like a gossip topic promising to keep us busy for a while, Microsoft's ad campaign is showing signs of failing even before it got a chance to take off properly. Admittedly, Microsoft's last (I'm a PC) ads have picked up the pace (compared with the Seinfeld ads), but reports of them having been made on Macs makes the company behind the Windows OS downright pathetic. What’s more, it seems the protagonists in Microsoft's ads are actual Apple fans.

Upon kicking off its $300 million ad campaign targeting Apple's aggressive “Get a Mac” commercials, Microsoft ditched comedian Jerry Seinfeld in favor of more appealing characters, such as their own “PC guy,” and celebrities like hip-hop singer Pharrell.

Three ads with the “I'm a PC” theme were made and, after their debut, Microsoft publicized some images from them. Without fail, tech savvy folks had a closer look at the metadata contained in the pictures, which revealed that the ads had been made on a Mac. A Computerworld piece said that “four of the images that Microsoft made available on its PressPass site [...] display the designation 'Adobe Photoshop C3 Macintosh' when their file properties are examined.” Ok, no biggie - everyone uses Macs to do graphics, so it's understandable if Microsoft too wanted top-notch video quality.

However, while the ads show each protagonist sharing their reasons why PC is their choice, Silicon Valley-based blog Valleywag reveals that pretty much all of them are Apple fans. Longoria, one of the featured actors, owns a MacBook. Pharrell Williams himself carries an iPhone encased in gold (no surprise there), while Chopra said, in a column on nuclear weapons published in the Huffington Post, that it was "good to sell more iPods" as they were "entertaining and harmless."

Sure, this says little about their actual computing solutions of choice (the iPhone and iPod are not Macs, just in case anyone asks), but it doesn't boost Microsoft's image either.