Microsoft’s new $300 million advertising campaign has been kept tightly underwraps but word has spread that Jerry Seinfeld will be one of the key celebrity pitchmen. The Wall Street Journal reports that Jerry Seinfeld will appear with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in ads and receive about $10 million for his work.
The new ad effort is expected to use some form of the slogan “Windows, Not Walls,” several people familiar with the matter told the Journal. The campaign, said to debut September 4, 2008, is one of the largest in the company’s history.
The use of Seinfeld is part of an attempted image overhaul which comes as Microsoft executives privately acknowledge that Windows has grown stale and suffered by Apple’s “Mac vs. PC” ads.
Microsoft’s immediate goal is to reverse the negative public perception of Windows Vista, says the Journal.
The software has sold well, and Microsoft still has an overwhelming share of the market, but Apple’s computer sales have been on the rise and Vista is hampered by the notion that it has technical shortcomings and is hard to use.
“They are not seen as cool,” Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, told the Journal. “Apple is cool. Can anyone even recall a Microsoft ad? No.”
For its new campaign, Microsoft also considered a range of other famous personalities, including comedians Will Ferrell and Chris Rock, according to people familiar with the matter.
Even though Seinfeld‘s sitcom stopped production in 1998, the comic still has major appeal with consumers, according to Davie-Brown Entertainment, a marketing company owned by Omnicom Group. He ranks 41st out of more than 1,900 celebrities in terms of broad appeal, the firm’s data show.
Seinfeld was previously a spokesman for American Express starring in their “Superman” commercials and Web videos in 2004 won raves. People familiar with the Microsoft campaign told the Journal the company was aware of trying too hard to pander to youth, so didn’t want a celebrity that was possibly just a flash-in-the-pan.
