AdWeek's "Best of the 2000s"

[Bertuzzied]

[Bertuzzied]

[FanIn80]

[Bertuzzied]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Wicked! A picture really is worth a thousand words. or maybe none at all.

[HPLovecraft]

Originally Posted by Bertuzzied

Wicked! A picture really is worth a thousand words. or maybe none at all.

Quoted so FanIn80's ignore list becomes useless! Muahaha!

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by HPLovecraft

Quoted so FanIn80's ignore list becomes useless! Muahaha!

Damn you!

[Barnes]

Originally Posted by Bent Wookie

...

MS doesn't need to respond to the Mac advertising campaign. Which is why they never have. Their ads concentrate on their product not the competition. I have always thought Apple's approach to be interesting considering this...

Er... what? This can't be further than from the truth.

Microsoft's campaigns around the time Apple started Get a Mac.

Silence for awhile....

Finally a new campaign. Commercials featuring a retired employee/founder and and comic who hasn't been relevant in 10 years. They talked about shoes and chiros, not Microsoft products.

They then killed that and switched to I'm a PC ads where they started to respond to Apple by telling us that using a PC can be cool and PC users are not the John Hodgeman stereotype. Pretty good campaign but no Microsoft products.

Next they did the laptop hunter campaign where they directly compared the price of Apple laptops against HP and Sony laptops. Not a single Microsoft product mentioned. Terrible campaign featuring some terrible machines.

Finally as of the past few months, we have some decent ads for Bing and Windows 7. They show actual Microsoft products and or show people talking about or actually using them and demonstrating the features.

Like I said before, things ARE changing for the better at Microsoft. You can even see it in their Ad campaigns.

Originally Posted by Barnes

Er... what? This can't be further than from the truth.

Microsoft's campaigns around the time Apple started Get a Mac.

Silence for awhile....

Finally a new campaign. Commercials featuring a retired employee/founder and and comic who hasn't been relevant in 10 years. They talked about shoes and chiros, not Microsoft products.

They then killed that and switched to I'm a PC ads where they started to respond to Apple by telling us that using a PC can be cool and PC users are not the John Hodgeman stereotype. Pretty good campaign but no Microsoft products.

Next they did the laptop hunter campaign where they directly compared the price of Apple laptops against HP and Sony laptops. Not a single Microsoft product mentioned. Terrible campaign featuring some terrible machines.

Finally as of the past few months, we have some decent ads for Bing and Windows 7. They show actual Microsoft products and or show people talking about or actually using them and demonstrating the features.

Like I said before, things ARE changing for the better at Microsoft. You can even see it in their Ad campaigns.

I stand corrected.... a little anyway.

What I was getting at, besides the historical instances you speak of, MS's (which generally is synonymous with 'PC') ad campaign isn't intended to knock the competition like Apple's- they don't need to. They are the most popular computing company in the world.

[octothorp]

I think Microsoft has gotten much better in their ad campaigns and the current "Windows 7 was my idea" campaign is very strong. But they also committed one of the stupidest cross promo tie-ins I've ever seen:

During NBC's green week, there were PSAs with NBC stars, one of which had Masi Oka (of Heroes) talking about the importance of buying produce locally. The benefit, he said, was that it reduced carbon emissions because stuff wasn't shipped around unnecessarily. And the spot ended by say it was brought to us by Microsoft. It was immediately followed by one of the Microsoft ads (brand new at that time) where they fly somebody around the world just to turn on a computer and see how fast it boots up.

The "Windows 7 was my idea" campaign is great though, and very unusual for them. It admits the flaws of the previous versions, it softly mocks the lack of useful innovation in typical Windows releases, but does so in a way that doesn't feel self-deprecating, and keeps it very positive and forward thinking. It's not trying to argue Windows over Mac, it's trying to argue Windows 7 over previous versions, which is a good strategy: converting 10% of vista or XP owners to Windows 7 has a far, far greater impact on the bottom line than converting 10% of Mac users to Windows.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by octothorp

The "Windows 7 was my idea" campaign is great though, and very unusual for them. It admits the flaws of the previous versions, it softly mocks the lack of useful innovation in typical Windows releases, but does so in a way that doesn't feel self-deprecating, and keeps it very positive and forward thinking. It's not trying to argue Windows over Mac, it's trying to argue Windows 7 over previous versions, which is a good strategy: converting 10% of vista or XP owners to Windows 7 has a far, far greater impact on the bottom line than converting 10% of Mac users to Windows.

Awesome. This is the kind of stuff I was hoping to read. Thank you.

[bomber317]

Hey, all I was suggesting, was perhaps that re-wording the OP in such a way that you do generate the discussion you were looking for, instead of expecting the MS/Apple discussion for 1 to 2 pages before seeing something useful/interesting.

I'm not saying "don't mention Apple", it was just a possibility to think about instead of only listing the Apple winners.

Anyways, do you guys think the commercials that MS and Apple have generated change the way commercials are made?

I'm starting to see more of that in Car commercials, with the brand vs brand fighting.

I do find them effective as those are the commercials I tend to remember.

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Also, to whoever it was that said I could have just posted this thread without the Apple stuff... Really? One company won more awards than any other company (by a pretty big margin), but I'm not allowed to post about it? If this was a music awards thread and some band won seven of them, would I not be allowed to mention that when I created the thread?

How does that make any sense?

[SebC]

Originally Posted by bomber317

I'm starting to see more of that in Car commercials, with the brand vs brand fighting.

Chevy Malibu ... "more fun to drive than a Toyota Camry, better looking than a Honda accord."

That one makes me laugh... anybody who's ever looked at a Car and Driver knows that Toyotas aren't fun to drive, and the second half of their statement is completely subjective. It's just so cherry-picked. The Malibu could just as easily be "less fun to drive than a Honda Accord, worse looking than a Toyota Camry."

Commercials for our product vs. our competitors product have been around for ages... but usually it's "the leading brand" or what not. I always thought they weren't allowed to directly name their competitors, which makes me wonder if the laws have changed.

And FYI it's not Windows 7 that I consider to be a response to Mac, it's Vista. Windows 7 takes it's Mac-like features from Vista, not from Mac.

[llama64]

I find Microsoft's "Windows 7 is MY idea" campaign to reak of laziness.

When I am buying a piece of high performance engineering (as you would expect a front line OS to be), I want to have confidence in the manufacturer/product. When I see a commercial with a 8' bigfoot explaining how re-sizing windows on his laptop was his idea, I begin to wonder why Microsoft's engineers couldn't figure that out themselves (is his wife seriously 4 feet tall?).

Basically it boils down to me wondering if Microsoft as a brand requires outside innovation just to make a viable product.

Apple's apparent "smugness" can also be interpreted as confidence. They believe that their product is superior in a direct way to Microsoft's so they attack it directly.

Comparatively:
Apple says: "My product is awesome, you are awesome, we should hook up "
Microsoft says: "My product is awesome because you had to tell me how to be awesome"

Which one do you want to have sex with?

[octothorp]

Originally Posted by bomber317

Anyways, do you guys think the commercials that MS and Apple have generated change the way commercials are made?

I'm starting to see more of that in Car commercials, with the brand vs brand fighting.

I do find them effective as those are the commercials I tend to remember.

Good point. There's definitely more of it going on right now. It seems like a lot of fighting within very focused markets (for example, the commercial that shows one family struggling to fit in theirs competitor SUV, and then another family fitting easily into theirs). I guess if they know that most decisions in that particular market come down to a decision between those two SUVs, it's a good way to go. A lot of TV viewers will ignore it because they're not interested in either brand or in that type of car, but if it works for that very small segment that's making that decision, then it might be worth it.

But it's much easier for a company like Apple, who knows that the entire audience out there is either a PC user, or dislikes PCs, or sometimes both.

[jammies]

Leaving aside the question of which is better - PC or Mac - I question the selection of an ad campaign that still leaves the market leader with a better than 90% market share and the challenger with less than 10% as worthy of all kinds of praise. Isn't the point of advertising to move units, not impress magazine editors?

Apple is like a luxury brand that doesn't get to charge real luxury prices. What's the point in being Lexus when you're still getting Toyota dollars per unit?

[bomber317]

Originally Posted by jammies

Leaving aside the question of which is better - PC or Mac - I question the selection of an ad campaign that still leaves the market leader with a better than 90% market share and the challenger with less than 10% as worthy of all kinds of praise. Isn't the point of advertising to move units, not impress magazine editors?

Apple is like a luxury brand that doesn't get to charge real luxury prices. What's the point in being Lexus when you're still getting Toyota dollars per unit?

Well, it's all relative, what was Apple's market share before?

I guess a good question is what was their market share before the commercials started to air and what was it before?

I'm just throwing random numbers out there, but say they went from 8% to 10% share, that is quite the increase for them, I think roughly a 25% increase. That is moving more units and keeping your shareholders happy.


In terms of a car, I think targeting the small segment of people trying to decide between certain cars could be effective. I mean, how many times have we seen a random commercial that makes us go "oh man, we should get that?". If I was looking for an SUV, and a comparison commercial shows up, that would have more impact on me then a SUV commercial talking about itself.

[octothorp]

Originally Posted by bomber317

Well, it's all relative, what was Apple's market share before?

I guess a good question is what was their market share before the commercials started to air and what was it before?

I'm just throwing random numbers out there, but say they went from 8% to 10% share, that is quite the increase for them, I think roughly a 25% increase. That is moving more units and keeping your shareholders happy.

In 2006, when the Mac vs. PC ads, rolled out, the Mac US market share was 3.5%. They're now at 9.4%. So the growth rate is more like 250% growth. I'd say those are the sort of growth that would make any advertising exec happy, regardless of any further accolades.

[SebC]

Originally Posted by jammies

Apple is like a luxury brand that doesn't get to charge real luxury prices. What's the point in being Lexus when you're still getting Toyota dollars per unit?

Some might argue that Mac is a non-luxury product that charges luxury prices, but I'm not going there.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by octothorp

In 2006, when the Mac vs. PC ads, rolled out, the Mac US market share was 3.5%. They're now at 9.4%. So the growth rate is more like 250% growth. I'd say those are the sort of growth that would make any advertising exec happy, regardless of any further accolades.

Exactly.

It's pretty hard to argue against a the value of a marketing campaign that saw a company increase their market share by almost 250% in just over three years.

[I_H8_Crawford]

Originally Posted by llama64

I find Microsoft's "Windows 7 is MY idea" campaign to reak of laziness.

When I am buying a piece of high performance engineering (as you would expect a front line OS to be), I want to have confidence in the manufacturer/product. When I see a commercial with a 8' bigfoot explaining how re-sizing windows on his laptop was his idea, I begin to wonder why Microsoft's engineers couldn't figure that out themselves (is his wife seriously 4 feet tall?).

Basically it boils down to me wondering if Microsoft as a brand requires outside innovation just to make a viable product.

Apple's apparent "smugness" can also be interpreted as confidence. They believe that their product is superior in a direct way to Microsoft's so they attack it directly.

Comparatively:
Apple says: "My product is awesome, you are awesome, we should hook up "
Microsoft says: "My product is awesome because you had to tell me how to be awesome"

Which one do you want to have sex with?

I'd bet only the 2nd one would do ATM since I would be telling it how to be awesome.