So Microsoft does keep an eye out for Apple. And perhaps even an ear out for Apple's lawyers.
Recently, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner claimed that Apple's legal vultures had called Redmond, aggrieved at alleged inaccuracies in Microsoft's Laptop Hunters campaign.
He described the call as being better than an evening with Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston. Well, perhaps not quite. But he certainly used phrases like "greatest single phone call," as if only multiple phone calls from Cupertino would have made him more excited.
However, according to AdAge Microsoft has actually made changes to one of the Laptop Hunter ads.
It's the one featuring Lauren, the aspiring law student, and her mom, who claimed that Lauren usually gets what she wants.
In the original version of the ad, Lauren, who wants to spend a maximum of $1,700 on her computing dreams, offered this competing statement: "This Mac is $2,000, and that's before adding anything."
Her mom, Sue, asks her why she would pay twice the price. To which Lauren gives her the steely look of a future prosecutor and says: "I wouldn't."
This loving familial exchange has now been edited out. The old version has been removed from YouTube and replaced with a new version, in which Lauren merely says: "It seems like you're paying a lot for the brand."
A Microsoft representative told AdAge: "We slightly adjusted the ads to reflect the updated pricing of the Mac laptop shown in the TV advertisement. This does not change the focus of the campaign, which is to showcase the value and choice of the PC."
In a week in which Microsoft admitted that sales of PCs are sluggish, might it be possible that Apple's lawyers will be taking advantage of happy hour on Friday night?
With a sip of the finest chardonnay, of course.
Back in May, my crystal ball twitched with wonderment at the idea that Microsoft might be feeling a frisson of excitement that Apple had decided to make an ad in response to Redmond's "Laptop Hunters" campaign.
I suggested that Microsoft executives would be dancing with fair glee and abandon.
It seems that, for once, my crystal ball may not have been full of Bay Area fog.
The revelation that Apple's lawyers allegedly called Microsoft to complain about the Laptop Hunters ads has brought much needed amusement to those who have not seen humor in quite some time.
Indeed, Friday, AdAge began to speculate as to whether Apple might become a Microsoft Hunter and drop a little lawsuit on Redmond's charmers.
The report quoted Michael McSunas, an attorney at Chambliss, Bahner and Stophel, who said that legally Apple "would have a leg to stand on."
McSunas continued: "If, indeed, you now can buy a MacBook for under $1,000, then [the 'Laptop Hunters' campaign] would be inaccurate and misleading."
But grinding your teeth and filing suit are two different things.
So McSunas speculated: "Apple seems to have this sort of cool image; I'd be surprised if they'd file suit on something like this...It would be bad publicity and only make people talk about Microsoft being more relevant."
Does having "this sort of cool image" really preclude Apple from suing or at least doing a little more than wearing black and looking superior?
There is precedent for ads being taken off air when the claims within them were no longer accurate. Chrysler, McSunas pointed out, persuaded Ford to remove an ad for its Freestar minivan in 2004.
But the truth is that in any kind of legal action, the PR is more important than the actual legal action.
If there is one area (and, of course, there are more) in which Apple is extremely talented, it is the area of making people feel exactly what the company wants them to feel.
If the company thought there might be PR value in publicly upbraiding Microsoft, you can be sure that it will lay the groundwork meticulously before delivering a nasty two-fingered jab just below the eyebrows.
It is one thing your lawyer calling Microsoft and telling the company to knock it off. It is something slightly different (and a lot more fun) when Redmond tries to make PR capital from your phone call.
Will Apple file suit? Unlikely. But will it let it all just bubble away like a virus on a cheap PC? Somehow, I doubt it.
So here's what having a strategy and taking a stand gets you. Yes, results.
At least that seems to be the conclusion one can reach from new data culled by BrandIndex. BrandIndex is a company that seems to get its kicks from tracking brands every 24 hours. A little neurotic, if you ask me. But you have to make a living somehow.
Anyway, its latest data suggests that Microsoft's "Laptop Hunters" campaign is radically altering value perceptions of PCs.
According to a report in AdAge, BrandIndex says Microsoft's so-called value perception has risen steadily since the campaign began in March, while Apple's has fallen.
Last winter, Apple stood at 70 on the value scale, while Microsoft was at zero. (Zero means that as many people feel bad about a brand as good) Now, Apple has fallen to 12.4, while Microsoft has risen to a glorious 46.2.
Here's the thing that might make you pause for wonder: the people who seem to be most influenced by the Microsoft campaign are aged 18 to 34.
Brand Index's global managing director for polling service YouGov told AdAge: "Apple had a pretty big advantage, historically, when we look at our data. Apple did a great job of putting Microsoft on the defensive. It made them look old, stodgy, complicated to use and unhip. But Microsoft has started to hit back, and younger folks are more cost- or value-focused."
I love research. I really do. It provides great fodder for discussion, cogitation and, ultimately, fireplaces.
The thing I am slightly more fascinated by is sales.
Currently, it may well be that younger people, who just might have less disposable income than those slightly older, are ragingly cost-conscious. (I have embedded a video that shows one young person's purchasing plight.) So when a survey person calls or e-mails them, they will give ragingly cost-conscious arguments.
This doesn't necessarily mean that their attitude while answering interesting existential questions will mirror their behavior when they come to buy.
Far more significant is the fact that Apple decided to respond to the Laptop Hunters campaign with an ad of its own. The competition always knows more than the researchers.
Microsoft has so far only pointed to a 10 percent increase in preference for PCs since the campaign was launched. When accurate and consistent sales figures emerge, they will be very interesting.
For those of you who are interested in what the slightly older folks thought, well, in the 35 to 49 age group, Microsoft went up a couple of weeks after the campaign launched, but now Apple has regained its lead.
Do these older people have more money or more sense? I will leave that to you to decide.
Through its Laptop Hunter campaign, Microsoft has proved there are so many people in Los Angeles looking for a laptop that I am surprised Apple has not responded with an exclusively LA version of its own ads.
You know, 60 seconds of people just talking about themselves and eating wheatgrass, while Justin Long looks on, mesmerized.
So let us celebrate Redmond's takeover of America's cleanest-living city by meeting another Lauren.
Yes, there is more than one Lauren in LA who needs a laptop and scours Craigslist for acting opportunities. This Lauren is about to be a law student. She therefore wants "speed, portability, and battery life". For under $1,700.
Lawyers, you see, must take their vast, fast, infernal brains with them at all times and expect them to sock it to a jury without a socket.
Lauren's mom, with a stern face that suggests she might favor hanging and flogging, becomes most concerned when Lauren wafts over to those enticingly evil Apple laptops. Lauren gingerly fingers a Mac that costs $2,000, even before you add anything on it.
Mom cross-examines Lauren: "Why would you pay twice the price?" Lauren, who has clearly not been coached for the witness stand, replies: "I wouldn't."
So we lurch towards the happy ending, already sensing that this movie, featuring the blonde, bubbly Lauren's quest for student satisfaction, will be entitled "For Whom the Dell Tolls."
And the toll is so cheap for this Dell XPS 13: $972. That's less than the cost of all the law books she'll have to buy in college.
Thankfully, there is still one left in the store. These things are popular. Who amongst you knew that?
Lauren gets exactly what she (and the highly neutral market research company for whom she thinks she is filming the ad) wants. Mom smiles as she tells us that her little girl usually gets what she wants. I am sure her future college sorority sisters are looking forward to meeting Lauren.
In this case, what Lauren wanted was for the Mac to get six months in solitary (at Best Buy) for price gouging, as she takes the first, important step towards her rightful place on the Supreme Court.
And may I just make it entirely clear that there is nothing funny at all in the fact that Lauren's mom is called Sue.
I did hear a rumor that this may be the last of these beguiling Laptop Hunter ads. I'm not so sure. Now that we are being aggressively informed just how cheap PCs are (and especially now that Apple has been moved to respond), I can see more LA demographics being plundered in order to keep the fun going.
I wonder if we soon might see "Lauren Bacall, Laptop Hunter". I'm not sure she'd be quite so easy to please.
I hear an excited rumbling in the tummies of the Responsible in Redmond.
I see the tiniest glint in their eyes that is not caused by tree pollen. For Apple has decided to address the Microsoft "Laptop Hunters" campaign, albeit in its usual laconic manner.
John Hodgman, the actor behind the PC guy, has the human version of most of Best Buy with him, as a laptop huntress called Megan declares she wants a big screen with a fast processor.
One by one, the suitors are dismissed as being unsuitable. Their failings? Small screens. Slow processors. Oh, and viruses, crashes, and headaches. A couple had really dreadful suits too.
Perhaps Apple decided that, in a difficult economy, it had to address arguments that it sees as bilge-filled bunkum. Perhaps the company thought the Microsoft ads opened themselves up a little too much to some spring amusement.
However, I am sure that Microsoft executives will be bringing out their handkerchiefs and donning those tight pants with little bells on the bottom in order to perform a ritual dance around the Redmond Morris pole.
This is something that they have not been able to do in quite some time.
The latest Laptop Hunter TV spot from Microsoft is the very definition of a hard sell.
No, not because it barks at you to buy a PC or you'll miss out on the deal of the century (even though you will, you will), but because it goes after the fearless foot soldiers of the Apple army--artists.
Sheila is a filmmaker. She wants something with a fast processor and a big screen. She also wants something that will be able to cut video. And all this for less than $2,000.
I look at Sheila's face and I want to make a film with her. She has the eyes of one of those film editors whose only familiarity with daylight is when they stumble out of an editing suite to have a cigarette and suddenly realize dawn is breaking and it's Tuesday, not Sunday.
However, this is a commercial and she's a little too dressy. If she'd been wearing jeans with a thousand coffee stains, a Black Sabbath T-shirt covered in croissant crumbs, and fingernails bitten to the wrist, she would have delivered the authentic film-editing look.
Instead, Sheila looks like a mom who's just popped over to Starbucks for a chai, a maple scone, and a colorful mug for her kids before popping across the mall for a pedi and a neck massage.
As is customary in this campaign, the script-free script calls for the protagonist to dismiss a Mac. Sheila looks at us and tells us the only Mac in her budget has a mere 2GB. Not enough for all the footage she intends to shoot for her L.A. version of "Gone With the Wind"--provisionally entitled "Gone to Bikram Yoga."
She shrugs to dismiss the MacBook Pro, as if to say: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a RAM."
She swiftly chooses a Hewlett-Packard HDX 16t.
Yet, one can't help feel as if Sheila's essential niceness suggests Microsoft has become a little tired of the more robust style epitomized by the first two hunters, Lauren and Giampaolo.
Perhaps, despite the current worldwide charge toward saving money, people still want wit and charm to balance the dry drag of their daily lives.
Even artists are trying to make happy films these days.
In its new Mac attack that debuted to coincide with students who can afford Macs playing basketball, Microsoft wants to make something very, very clear: truly, madly beautiful people buy PCs.
People who are picky about their hairstyle, their T-shirts, their jeans. Oh, yes, and their ability to withstand brand messages.
"I don't want to pay for the brand," says Giampaolo, who may or may not have had a bit part in "Twilight." "I want to pay for the computer." That computer should have "portability, battery life, and power."
Giampaolo says he's "technically savvy," though his car (if it is his) seems a little like an old Atari on wheels. Maybe it's a retro thing.
Still, there is one thing very different about Giampaolo's attitude from that of Lauren, the first Laptop Hunter: there is no way he's going into an Apple store.
One can only speculate why. Perhaps it is something to do with the strong rumor that, in filming the Lauren ad, she never actually spoke to anyone in the Apple store. She seems to have been in and out in fewer seconds than it takes to answer a Craigslist ad.
Giampaolo does, however, find a MacBook in an all-encompassing computer store. He declares it "so-oooo sexy." But although she's pretty and she might be a great one-night stand, she's just not a good long-term lover. Is it because she's high-maintenance? Is it because she's flighty? No, she just isn't intellectual enough for Giampaolo.
Well, he's picky, he knows what he wants and, just like his cool jeans, he goes out and gets it. This is all entirely acceptable and understandable.
There is only one thing that nags at me, in that way that a loose seam on your jeans nags at your spare tire.
If Giampaolo were technically (or is it technologically?) savvy, he'd have known exactly what he wanted from the very beginning. There would have been no need to look at a MacBook, no need to look at keyboards that were too small for his very, very large hands.
He'd have just gone straight for the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion HDX.
That would have made for a pretty short ad, wouldn't it?
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