“Even though Windows XP has been on the market for more than three years, Microsoft is hoping a new advertising campaign will ‘start something’ when it comes to enthusiasm for the operating system,” Ina Fried reports for CNET News. “The campaign, which will last for 15 months, is designed to showcase all the things Windows can do.”
MacDailyNews Take: No, the campaign will not feature getting infected with a virus that wipes your hard drive clean nor will it showcase downloading critical patches to patch OS patches that you thought were patched until yesterday’s patch broke last month’s patch, you patcher.
Fried continues, “The campaign which will launch in 11 countries with online, print and television ads, will try to play up Windows as the start to many things. The ads will have messages like “Start something curious,” “Start discovering lost cities” and “Start feeding your brain.” In all, Microsoft said there are 51 TV spots, 39 print ads and 250 online advertisements.”
MacDailyNews Take: Unfortunately, “Start waking up,” “Start thinking for yourselves,” and “Start looking beyond the initial sticker price” will not be used. “Start is for shutting down,” “Start reformatting your hard drive for your biannual fresh Windows install,” and “Start getting owned” most definitely will not be mentioned within the confines of Microsoft’s campaign.
Fried continues, “the ‘Start Something’ campaign will serve as a run up to the debut of Longhorn, the next version of Windows, which is set to go on sale by next year’s holiday shopping season. Jim Allchin, the head of the Windows unit, said in an interview last week to expect a massive ad push for Longhorn as well.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Let the attention diversion from Tiger begin! Advertising an operating system on a massive scale? Now, that’s actually innovative — at least it is in Cupertino. Wonder what would happen if Apple would try something like that with Mac OS X Tiger?
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Mossberg: ‘consider dumping Windows altogether and switching to Apple’s Macintosh’ – April 18, 2005
Why doesn’t Apple advertise Mac OS X on TV? – April 12, 2005