Have you seen the new "I'm A PC" commercial?
Meet Lauren. Lauren wants to find a laptop for under US$1000, with a 17" screen and a comfortable keyboard amongst other criteria.
She's promised by anonymous voiceover man (who's graphically accompanied by a contemporary Windows logo) that if she can find what she's looking for, they'll buy it for her.
So off she goes; first to the "Mac store". Without even showing us the store, she comes out and states that the only laptop under $1000 inside has a 13" screen. Dejected and disappointed, she reckons she's just "not cool enough to be a Mac person".
Then we find ourselves in Best Buy, the camera dollying down rows of shiny new laptops, Lauren grinning everywhere she goes. She finds exactly what she wants: an HP Pavilion with 4GB of RAM and a 250GB hard disk. It appears to be running Vista. And it only costs $699.99! So she buys it and goes home all happy.
Now, it's a well-produced video. The actress is photogenic enough and it's pretty decent marketing especially when you consider Microsoft's most recent not-so-successful offerings.
So it's too bad the whole thing is utterly shameless. They don't even bother hiding the fact that the girl got paid $700, on camera, to say nice things about a computer running Windows. And even this is only in the unlikely event that she's not simply an actress picked out of drama school getting paid in cash.
"I'm a PC, and I got just what I wanted [for free]."
It's such a waste of decent production values, if you ask me. Catch the full video after the jump.
Bootnote
And yes, I realise that by posting this commentary I'm generating more awareness of the video. Frankly, though, who hasn't heard of Microsoft?
