Thanks to Apple's well-publicized complaint about Microsoft's "Laptop Hunters" advertisements (Kevin Turner, Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer called it "the greatest single phone call in the history that [he'd] ever taken in business,") the ads have been changed.
Apple's legal department called demanding that Microsoft change the "Laptop Hunter" ads because they are factually inaccurate. In response, Turner said, "We're just going to keep running them and running them and running them."
The ads showed consumers looking for laptops, and ultimately deciding on Windows-based PCs because of their value for the price. The series famously opened with a young woman declaring, "I'm just not cool enough to be a Mac person," and continued with a number of spots echoing the same theme, shoppers forgoing Macs for Windows computers over value issues.
Despite Turner's claim that Microsoft wouldn't change the ads, the latest in the series has reportedly been edited to mollify Apple.
The one minute "Lauren and Sue" spot originally had a girl and her mother shopping for a laptop, and the daughter said, "This Mac is $2,000, and that's before adding anything."
The mother then asks, "Why would you pay twice the price?"
"I wouldn't!" Lauren replies. Ultimately, the girl leaves with a sub-$1000 Dell XPS notebook. According to Advertising Age, this segment has been replaced by Lauren simply saying, "It seems like you're paying a lot for the brand."
Microsoft confirmed that it had updated the ad to reflect the new lower price of the particular Mac they showed in the commercial, but said it does not reflect a broad change in the campaign.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009