What do you get when you combine one of the world’s most powerful technology companies with its biggest and most expensive advertising campaign ever? The answer is…Jerry Seinfeld.

Various news outlets including Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Microsoft is gearing up to spend $300 million in advertising to bolster the flagship ‘Windows’ brand. The theme of the campaign is reported to be ‘’Windows, Not Walls’’ and is expected to focus on how people connect ideas together when barriers are removed.

The Windows brand and Vista in particular have been the subject of a series of impactful and (in my opinion) really funny bashes by Apple – as depicted in recent Mac advertisements which feature a hipster (‘’I’m a Mac’’) and a Bill Gates look-alike (‘’And I’m a PC’’). You can view the campaign ads here: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ (fair warning: you can spend a lot of time viewing these as they go back several years – and they’re really entertaining!).

So to bolster its tattered Vista / Windows reputation Microsoft is turning to another powerful icon: Mr. Jerry Seinfeld. The company will pay Mr. Seinfeld a reported $10 million to participate (and one would assume make sure the ads are really funny). Guess who else is starring in the ads according to the reports? Mr. Bill Gates! Wow, so he’s not really retired at all – he’s just career shifted into television advertising work.

This has the makings of an epic advertising battle – and I for one can’t wait. As a marketer for the VPS and dedicated servers hosting experts at HostMySite.com, I have dreamed of going up against a huge iconic company like Microsoft armed with only a paltry few tens of millions in ad money and my sense of what the marketplace will respond to.

I expect Microsoft to hold its own quite well in this advertising battle. After all, it is much harder to get users to switch than to just sit pat. The real shot across Microsoft’s bow has already been dealt in the form of the iPhone – a device which Microsoft has no current answer for. The advertising campaigns seem to be merely stating the obvious: that a new era of mobile, always-on, always-connected computing which relies less and less on the operating system of the local device, and more on ‘the cloud’ has dawned.

So what is Microsoft’s answer to this game-changing shift? Maybe Jerry Seinfeld can come up with one.

Tags: Advertising, Apple, Microsoft

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under Articles, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.