Microsoft is planning a new US$120 million advertising campaign aimed at redefining its public image. The campaign, which includes television, print, and Internet advertising, attempts to change the view that Microsoft is simply a "huge American company" by highlighting the work it does around the world promoting education and economic development.
The campaign, voiced by Fargo actor William Macy, is in some respects an extension of the current "Your potential. Our passion" advertisements, where young children are shown at school and play with animated chalk squiggles indicating their possible future accomplishments. That global ad campaign started in 2002, and ran the same commercials in countries all over the world. The new theme is to tailor the ads to each specific country.
Microsoft has suffered for years from rather lackluster advertising campaigns, certainly when compared with media-savvy rivals such as Apple Computer (although Apple's advertising originality has recently come into question). For years people made fun of Microsoft taglines such as "Making it Easier" or the much-maligned "Where do you want to go today?" The lack of attention to Microsoft's marketing has in the past been blamed on Bill Gates himself, who has often appeared to have a lukewarm attitude towards the art of advertising. (The company's very first campaign came out in 1976, when they had just seven employees, and was titled "The Legend of Micro-Kid.") However, with the rise of marketing graduate Steve Ballmer to the post of CEO in the year 2000, more attention has been paid to this subtle art. The "Start Something" campaign, begun in 2005 to promote the aging Windows XP operating system, is an example of the company's improved marketing skills.
Why is any of this important? Any company will, as a matter of course, put its best image forward in any current advertising campaign. But sometimes looking more deeply at the types of advertising a company puts out reveals hidden truths about the company itself. Wallmart's recent ad campaign, aimed at promoting a fuzzy warm feeling about working at the company, reveals a worry about negative fallout from all the bad press surrounding that company's business practices and treatment of employees. In a similar way, Microsoft's new ad campaign shows a new emphasis on global markets that may reflect a fear of the company being perceived as "too American," a feeling often utilized by European politicians to promote the latest effort to switch government offices to Linux.
Microsoft currently has 63,000 employees working in 102 countries. Over a third of these work outside the United States. So is Microsoft really a "huge American company" after all? Certainly they are the largest software company in the world, but hardly the largest company in IT. IBM, for example, has over 329,000 employees worldwide, with a similar percentage based in the US.
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