Microsoft’s Marketting Campaign Part I
“I am the Creative Commander in Chief of Digitalvaliance, and I am a PC”
Mac vs. PC - For the past few months, my company had been going through the decision many IT/Technology companies go through at some points in their existence. The decision was whether to delve into the brave new world of the mac or stay mundane, and stick to our good old PCs. Since we consider ourselves a “creative” company, it seemed as though the obvious choice would be the Mac. Macs were ubiqutious at my alma mater, Stanford University, and so I was exposed to them on a daily bases.
However, we would be lying to ourselves if we didn’t admit that another “allure” to Macs was the culture around their ownership. However, the new marketting campaign from Microsoft is having people rethink their views. The new marketting campaign (headed by Crispin Porter and Bugosky - the same company responsible for the funny Burger King ads amongst others) is quite brilliant in my opinion and I am surprised they hadn’t done this before. I think one of my favorite lines from their ad is that “I am a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype”. They show that despite whatever “following” Apple might have, that the reality of it is, they are by far the more dominant force. They show that they have aspiring & established people from all walks of life using PCs. They have everyone from children in developed countries to Vera Wang to Pharrell Williams saying “I am a PC”. Even if they paid Pharrell to say that he was a PC (a fact I do not know), the message is very powerful because for a while, Macs have been the way to go for music/artists.
I do not want to come across as a proponent of Microsoft/PCs.. but I did learn how to program on a PC. My dad was always tech savvy and made sure we had pretty much the latest technology. We had a Commodore 64 back in the day but I still credit my humble beginnings to the PC. I am also an avid Linux user, something that I will speak about later.
I do realize that its very “uncool” to like Microsoft or to support them, neither of which I am implying. They’ve had a series of blunders, they are a big bad monopolistic corporation and they really messed up big time with Vista and seriously, had me looking into getting a MacBook Pro (I have a few friends that work at Apple.. I was pretty much 20 seconds away on the phone from making the purchase since I could get a discount). However at the end of the day, we end up using PCs a good 70-80% of the time (split between Linux for most of our web development) and the only real reason to own a Mac for us, is to develop iPhone applications.
- We are PCs, and We make cool web sites and applications.