A couple weeks ago we saw the first commercials in Microsoft’s new ad campaign. They featured Jerry Seinfeld and were quite polarizing – either you liked them or you didn’t. Unfortunately for Seinfeld fans, he didn’t last long. Microsoft’s new commercials went live last night, as described by TechCrunch:
The three new non-Seinfeld commercials, which the New York Times described earlier this week, still don’t talk about Vista features. But they do try to break the stereotype that cool and interesting people use Macs, and everyone else is on a Windows machine.
The ads features a number of Microsoft employees and include email addresses for each. The star, Sean Siler, has an autoresponse to his sean@windows.com email address.
TechCrunch has embedded the three commercials in that post if you’d like to check them out. You can also see a longer version and a really funny comic at Long Zheng’s site.
I have to agree with Mary Jo Foley – I’m a little surprised that Microsoft is going after Apple. The “Mac vs. PC” ads have been incredibly successful and are very widely known, so I think directly responding to them is an incredibly daring thing for Microsoft to do. That said, I really like the new ads. They make Apple seem a little elitist.
I like this approach better than the Seinfeld commercials, and I look forward to seeing what Microsoft has planned next. Their marketing story is finally starting to get interesting!
By the way, I first noticed the new commercials were live when “I’m a PC” became a trending topic on Twitter Search. If you’re not already a regular user of Twitter Search, you should be!
MasterMaq's Blog 
Apple? Elitist? Of course!!! Apple’s always been elitist, the most glaring example probably being the think different campaign. It’s practically part of the sales pitch. That being said with the amount of world changing products they’ve released over their history, they have a right to be.
I think it’s kind of funny though – they are only elitist with the Mac; absolutely everyone has an iPod.