The ad world

We all know MACs are cooler than PCs. Just look at the ads- and the spoofs all over youtube for that matter...

But PC is fighting BACK!

Now Crispin has been handed perhaps its biggest challenge to date: Microsoft. The tech giant stunned the ad world in March when it passed over safer choices like Fallon, JWT, and its agency of record, McCann Worldgroup, and awarded its new $300 million consumer-branding campaign to Crispin.

It was an act of courage or desperation, depending on whom you ask. Over the past couple of years, Microsoft's already problematic reputation in some circles -- as the soulless, power-hungry purveyor of lackluster products -- has suffered a series of self-inflicted wounds.... "Microsoft has really lost control of its image," says Rob Enderle, an influential advisory analyst for tech companies including Dell, HP, and Microsoft. And with its two most formidable competitors -- Apple and Google -- boasting their own consumer cults, that's the last thing Microsoft can afford to do.

Nothing is doing more to carve away at Microsoft's reputation -- and contribute to its loss of market share -- than the assault launched by Apple two years ago in the form of the "Mac vs. PC" spots featuring The Daily Show satirist John Hodgman. The ads became immediate pop-culture fixtures, spawning more than 1,000 video spoofs on YouTube and taking home last year's Grand Effie, the ad industry's highest honor for effectiveness. "Nobody messes with anyone in the tech industry the way Apple has messed with Microsoft," says Enderle. "It's the first time I've ever seen a major national campaign that disparages a competitor, and the competitor just sits back and takes it.

Countering that nebbishy, pocket-protected image now falls to Crispin. And Bogusky's team is revved up at the prospect. "There was a time," says Jeff Hicks, Crispin's CEO, "when it was Avis against Hertz, Coke against Pepsi, Visa against American Express. I think Microsoft is at the epicenter of the great brand challenge of the next decade -- or millennium."

Questions is, most ads get designed on MACs.

Will they be drawing up PC ads criticizing MACs on MACs?

Until I join the ad world... GO PC!