With new ad deal Microsoft tries the Nixon approach to marketing
Microsoft's plan to counteract Apple's pigeonholing of the company as "PC," the staid, gray suit-wearing office drone played by John Hodgeman in Apple's commercials? Start sounding more like Richard Nixon of course. Microsoft announced it will spend $300 million on an advertising campaign with agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Corporate VP of Windows Consumer Product Brad Brooks told reporters the message will be: "The quiet majority of million and millions of Windows Vista users out there are going to have a great experience. The message is ‘Move to Vista. The time of worry is over.’" Sounds a lot like Nixon's 1969 appeal "to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans" for support for the Vietnam War to us. Which of course puts Apple in the late Beatles-esque, commercially safe "think different" psuedo-hippy crowd — right where it wants to be.