Posts Tagged ‘quicktime’

Microsoft’s New Ad Campaign: Media Player Required?

So Microsoft released a new ad campaign yesterday. It’s part of a $300 million ad campaign targeted at, although not mentioned by name as of yet, Apple’s ad campaign bashing Vista. The ad can be seen at windows.com and worked beautifully in Safari. Being the curious guy that I am, I wanted to go see the rest of the videos on why I should switch to Windows and I found something that struck me somewhat funny. In order to view the rest of the videos, I had to use Windows Media Player to view the file. Wait. Why would I want to install a Microsoft product on my computer just to see the videos about why I should switch to a Microsoft platform? So then I took it a step farther. Apparently Apple does the exact same thing. I hadn’t thought of it before since I’ve been running a Mac since the commercials came out, but I need to install QuickTime in order to view the ads. What kind of marketing is this? Is it really effective? Granted, most people are probably going to have QuickTime installed on their Windows machines, but I really am not going to install Windows Media Player on my MacBook if I can help it (why is it called Windows Media Player in the first place if it runs on platforms other than Windows?). I’m not a marketing person, so maybe I’m completely missing this, but the idea of making someone install software to see a video tour of your software seems ridiculous. I suppose it’s either Flash, QuickTime or WMV for the web so they are going to pick their own platform, but let’s tailor to our audience here.. I, for one, will not switch to Windows solely for that reason. Well, maybe it has something to do with the power of BSD and the nice user interface, but we’ll go with it.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 5th, 2008