The Easiest 10 Million Bucks Ever Made
September 5, 2008
Jerry didn't like the ad either...
This is ridiculous. After all the hype (at least to me… I love Seinfeld), Microsoft managed to take the funniest guy of all time, place him with the least funniest guy of all time, and create an advertisement that not only made no sense, but actually made Apple look even cooler than they did before the ad. I am secretly kind of upset: while its obviously good for an Apple fan when Microsoft makes a mistake, I like Seinfeld so much, I wanted to see something clever and unique. Instead I saw the biggest waste of 10 million dollars of all time. Besides, the whole joke saying “Bill is so rich! But yet he’s buying cheap stuff? Oh the comedic irony!” is old: we already saw this when they spoofed his last day at work.
Check out the video here.
Mac Soda 
I don’t know if I would go so far to say that Bill Gates is the “least funny guy of all time.” Microsoft is working on changing their image and this takes time. Whereas Apple’s marketing campaign is focused around the premise “let’s bash microsoft and talk about how our operating system is so much better and our users are so much cooler”.
Bottom line right now is that OSX in my personal opinion provides a better user experience. If you want to play video games, customize your hardware, work in a non-media related industry, or use specialized scientific software the choice is still windows.
If somehow we could merge all the software natively to OSX and Jobs would allow the user to actually take control of their hardware then things would really take off for apple. I own a desktop with XP and a macbook but most people can only afford one unit.
Getting back to the commercial, sure it wasn’t the best in the world but I’ll take it over the smugness of the MAC vs PC ads where they lie to the user: “I’m a mac, I do fun stuff like movies, and pictures etc.” “I’m a PC, I do fun things too like piecharts and spreadsheets…” when it should really say: “I’m a PC, I can actually do all those things, with faster hardware that is cheaper, user upgradable, customizable, and I can play the latest games and run 99% of all software on the planet.”
I don’t think you quite get it… I wouldn’t be surprised if this ad was just a “teaser” to get some attention before the “real stuff” (that actually points out features etc.) starts appearing. Think of it as the calm before the storm. If that was the intention, it worked imho very well because a lot of people are talking about it and speculating on what exactly it was about. But microsoft was announcing a campaign, not an ad. Seinfeld got the 10M for the campaign, not the ad. And I doubt this ad cost 300M to make, as announced for the campaign. IMHO it’s first step in a viral marketing kind of way… But, let’s see what happens in the upcoming days/weeks… 😉
Fell out of bed feeling down. This has birgehtned my day!