I'm a PC

Sean Siler, an actual Microsoft employee featured in the ad campaign

Meaghan identifying herself as a PC user while underwater in a shark cage

"I'm a PC" is the title for a television advertising campaign created for Microsoft by ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB). The series first began to appear in September, 2008. The new series of commercials replace those that featured the pairing of Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates.

The $300 million dollar advertising campaign was designed to challenge Apple's Get a Mac campaign by showing everyday people to be PC users.

The campaign was met with some criticism due to the discovery that the advertisements were created using the computers and operating system of Microsoft's main competitor, Apple Inc.

Campaign

The ad series features prominent and popular individuals saying "I'm a PC" and has appearances by common international users as well as personalities such as writer Deepak Chopra, mixed martial artist Rashad Evans, actress Eva Longoria Parker, photographer Geoff Green and singer Pharrell Williams.

The campaign was created by the CPB advertising agency and exhibited normal PC users to be found everywhere. It was the second phase of Microsoft's 2008 efforts to displace the ubiquity of Apple's "Get a Mac" ads, which portrayed the Mac as "cool and intuitive" and the PC as "boring and clunky". The Microsoft spots typically opened with an image of Sean Siler, a Microsoft employee stating "I'm a PC, and I've been made into a stereotype".

The composition was made to be initially resemble that of the Apple campaign, as Siler bears a resemblance to John Hodgman, the "PC" counterpart to Justin Long as a Mac in the Apple commercials.

The advertisements are also interspersed with various non-famous users who proclaim "I'm a PC" from a variety of places and in a number of methods. The intent is to demonstrate how PC users are ordinary people.

Criticism

Criticism of the campaign, mostly found on Internet technology portals and blogs, focused around the allegation that the four still images of the campaign posted at Microsoft's press site contained digital fingerprints from Adobe Photoshop being run on Apple computers.

The link between the advertisements and Apple computers was initially noted by a Flickr user who found traces of Apple's operating system and Adobe's CS3 graphics program embedded within the officially released images. Computerworld published similar findings, noting when the file properties of the images found at the Microsoft press site are examined the embedded string 'Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh' can be seen. According to an InformationWeek blog Microsoft responded overnight by digitally scrubbing the metadata from the images.

In an official press release Microsoft responded to the criticism, stating "as is common in almost all campaign workflow, agencies and production houses use a wide variety of software and hardware to create, edit, and distribute content, including both Macs and PCs".