Microsoft to Launch Vista Ad Campaign
By: Arie Slob
Windows Vista may have been on the market for a good year and a half now, but Microsoft finally thought it would be necessary to launch a multi-million dollar ad campaign. The aim of this campaign is to remove doubts & misconceptions about the OS. Finally Microsoft seems ready to defend itself against the inaccuracies raised by Apple in its infamous "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ad campaign, something I think they should have done much sooner.
Microsoft's Brad Brooks, the VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing acknowledged that Apples campaign had been having an effect: "We've got a pretty noisy competitor out there. You know it. I know it. It's caused some impact. We're going to start countering it".
The upcoming campaign will also focus on tackling user's perception of Vista as an OS that suffers from incompatibilities in both hardware and software.
On the compatibility issue, Microsoft has reported that 77,000 devices are compatible with Windows Vista today (double the number when Vista launched) as well as 99% of the major business applications. Microsoft has launched two Web sites, Windows Vista Small Business Assurance and the Windows Vista Compatibility Center, to help turn these perceptions around.
C|Net's Ina Fried this week came out with an interesting piece of news: Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista.
It seems likely that Microsoft wants to use footage from this 'exercise' in its upcoming campaign, which will be run both in the more traditional 'offline' media as well as online.
So what is your take? "Too late", or "About time"?
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