14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has found the panacea for Apple's “Get a Mac” ads. The Redmond company is fighting the consumer perception built by its rival in Cupertino by embracing closely the “I’m a PC” stereotype. Microsoft is moving to the next phase of its $300 million Windows marketing campaign, dropping Jerry Seinfeld and bringing other stars in the lime light. Not only celebrities as actress Eva Longoria and singer Pharrell Williams, but a plethora of Microsoft engineers ready to take back the “I'm a PC” story, to break the stereotype and to reinvent the label created by Apple. In the adjacent image you are in fact able to see one of the Microsoft employees closely resembling the I'm a PC Guy John Hodgman, as a character in Microsoft's new ads designed to acknowledge the fact that the PC user has been turned into a stereotype.
“So there seems to be the rumor running around that we're supposedly cancelling our Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld ads tomorrow. I wouldn't count on anything being "cancelled". It was always the plan to have Jerry Seinfeld in the first phase of the campaign and not a part of every ad. Instead, our Windows Consumer Campaign is moving into the next phase and we did mention previously that you should expect the campaign to evolve,” stated Christopher Flores, Director Windows Communications.
Microsoft plans to debut a new series of video advertisements for both television networks and the web dubbed “Real PC”. According to Microsoft, the “Real PC” is about community and not necessarily competition. In this sense, the Redmond giant is going to permit Windows PC and users to join in the conversation about the “Real PC”.
“One of the really fun things we’ve done is to create a series of ads called ‘I’m a PC’ -- and we’re enabling every PC user to upload their own I’m a PC spot. So you can upload it and we’ll publish it and amplify it on windows.com … and then we’ll do better than that - we’ll publish some of those I’m a PC spots in places like digital billboards in Times Square,” explained Bill Veghte, Senior Vice President, Online Services & Windows Business Group.