Digital Home Thoughts: Microsoft's $300 Million Windows Vista Ad Campaign

"If this is going to be the overall message of Microsoft's much-vaunted new $300 million ad campaign, it might be money well spent. According to the folks at LiveSide, the first ads in the new campaign were previewed at Microsoft's employees-only Global Exchange conference last week to rave reviews. As Tim Anderson astutely noted the other day, "Vista is now actually better than its reputation. That's a marketing issue." Microsoft's biggest challenge is to get would-be customers to set aside whatever preconceptions they have and listen to its pitch for Vista. Aligning its most vocal Vista critics with the Flat Earth Society is a clever way to get people's attention."

I don't know about you, but when I talk to people about Windows Vista, in almost every case they have no reason for disliking it or upgrading to it beyond "Well...I heard it sucked!". There's certainly a hardware issue with some people, but I'm often amazed at the craptastic hardware people use to run Windows XP - like the Dell Dimension 2400 with 256 MB of RAM I saw last month. Yikes! The above ad is apparently not a part of the official campaign, but I like the tone of it - pointing out that perceptions aren't always reality.