You pose a complicated question and my genuine answer is well… it depends.
Advertising is often times a venue to change a products perception and build more awareness of its value. Both Microsoft and Apple have both been, by many measures, successful in changing their brand perception through their commercial ads. But the fact that both of them originally made decisions that created this need to change perception and awareness shows that they were both unsuccessful in preventing problems. Resulting in them both spending millions to fix the perception problems they themselves allowed.

Apple limited its operating system to only be distributed on its high-end hardware and only through its own Apple stores. They also focused on a high-margin market with lower volume compared to Windows. For years, people surrounded by Windows computers began to become unfamiliar and alienated with apple’s operating system. The result: Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year for the last 3 years to change people’s unfamiliarity and unawareness of their operating system value via their switcher ads.

Microsoft did not actively control the messaging and education around its Windows operating system for years allowing Apple to significantly distort its brand perception. This was Microsoft’s own fault for being passive and unresponsive; Apple was just being a tough competitor. At the same time Microsoft overstretched their ambitions with Windows Vista not allowing themselves time to properly 3rd party compatibility.

Each company is now buying themselves out of the problems they allowed with expensive advertising, which seems to be working as I see them each as better companies than they were 5 years ago.

Which campaign do you personally think was more successful? And what do you base it on?

That is a good link but you did not mention what conclusions are you drawing from it?

The link shows that Microsoft’s 1 ad had 30% more viral views than Apple’s 3 ads combined – a straight forward comparison in Microsoft’s favor no matter how you slice it.

The other graph is more complicated because it does not control for multiple placements of apple ads on the same website. Assume a person likes the ads of Microsoft and Apple equally – what would that placement graph look like? It depends on 2 types of measurements:

1 By total placement volume: Apple is more successful because it launched a fresh set of 3 ads that allowed users to place more than one ad on their site – something they cannot do with microsoft yet. The focus of this measurement is on the overall campaign success not the individual ad.

2 By placement volume per ad: Microsoft’s 1 ad was more successful than any one of Apple’s ads recieving what looks like 20% more placements than the avg apple ad. The focus of this measurement is on the success of each ad rather than the whole campaign.

You can decide whether you prefer number 1 or 2 – but when writing the article explain how you are measuring a company’s marketing success and reference the data. If I read you article yesterday and you used method 1 to draw a conclusion that apple was better at marketing – well… I would completely agree with you (based on that measurement).

“A quarter into Leopard’s launch, 19% of Apple customers had installed the new OS. More than a year after Microsoft released Vista, only 13% of its customers had upgraded. Microsoft has even had to deal with reissuing copies of Windows XP, Vista’s successor, because of the dissatisfaction with Vista.” Doesn’t this measure success as well?

I agree that pivoting only off of market share is not a complete story either. There are several valueable data points to use when drawing conclusions around marketing spend. spend/units sold, spend/margin profit, spend/positive perspection increase. Even stats like spend/commercial minutes viewed, spend/repeat views, spend/youtube views…etc

The problem I found in your approach to this article is you drew a major conclusion (apple is better/more efficient at advertising) without solid data to get your readers to that point.

Apple might or might not have better marketing – but give me something to base that off of outside of the fact that a bigger company spends a lot on marketing a bigger product. Does apple have a higher viewer count per ad than msft on viral sites? Does apple have a higher online video completion rate per user than msft – where people watch the whole ad vs only half)? Do they have a higher embedding rate per ad than msft – people embedding the video on their own blog?

Apple could be a ‘yes’ to many of these questions – and when/if you provide that type of data you can more accurately draw a conclusion with your readers that based on this measurement Apple is better at marketing than microsoft.

Side note: Microsoft does not force its Windows on to people. HP and Dell only sell Windows because Apple prehibits them from licensing OSX. Apple is causing that not Microsoft or even the computer manufactures. Plus anyone with a web browser can buy an apple from their online store, or go into an Apple store at any major mall, or go into the largest eletronic retailer, Bestbuy, and purchase a Mac. If someone does not by a mac computer it is only because they did not want an Apple or that Apple did not want them.

I believe we should ignore market share for a moment and try and focus on how well the campaigns worked against each other.

You have to understand, if we keep relying on market share (for stats) then we can’t even draw ANY comparisons the two companies. Apple isn’t even in the same league as Microsoft when it comes to installed base. The market share and users (per million) side of the argument has to be set aside for some conversations or else it simply won’t progress.

While I cannot find any data for the post-seinfield and I’m a PC ads, Microsoft has definately been “moving copies of Vista”. In June, 2007, it had 4.54% market share. In June, 2008, it had reached 16.14% – more than a 355% gain. (Source PCWorld)

Writing that one tech company spends more on marketing than other tech company with overlapping products does not give any real perspective. Here is a statement with more perspective: Microsoft is spending $300M to advertise their Windows Vista (140M users), Windows Live (45M users), and Windows Mobile (18M users) products – Apple marketing cost 62% more to attract a smaller audience, with less revenue, and less profits.