How Microsoft Corporation Spent $400 Million Promoting the iPad

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When it comes to marketing, Apple Inc. (AAPL) tends to be somewhat thriftier than competitors like Microsoft (MSFT) and Samsung (SSNLF).

Of course, it helps when the other guys pick up the tab for promoting your products — which, unlikely as it sounds, is pretty much what Microsoft has done for Apple’s iPad with its $400 million Surface Pro deal with the NFL.

Apple iPad wins with Surface Pro fail

You probably saw highlights of Sunday’s National Football League AFC Championship game, during which an apparent wireless network issue rendered the New England Patriots’ Surface Pro tablets useless for 20 minutes.

While the technical problem may not have been Microsoft’s — the Denver Broncos’ Surface Pros were working fine during the outage — it was the Surface Pro that was the face of the glitch that was a memorable part of a championship football game seen by a national TV audience estimated at more than 53 million viewers.

As The Verge’s Nilay Patel pointed out, CBS (CBS) commentators called out the Surface Pros by name on air:

“They’re having some trouble with their Microsoft Surface tablets — on the last defensive possession the Patriots’ coaches did not have access to those tablets to show pictures to their players. NFL officials have been working at it. Some of those tablets are back in use, but not all of them. A lot of frustration that they didn’t have them on that last possession.”

To make things even worse (if it’s possible) a commercial aired during a break coinciding with the issue and guess what product was featured? That’s right — the Surface Pro!

Ouch.

Touchdown for the iPad

What makes the “spotlight” the Surface Pro received during the game even more galling (at least if you’re Microsoft) is that announcers have repeatedly referred to the Microsoft Surface as an iPad during broadcasts. But when it gets implicated in an outage, they get the “Microsoft Surface” right.

Film clips of Patriots’ coaches struggling with the unresponsive Microsoft Surface tablets on the sidelines promptly hit Twitter (TWTR), spawning hashtags like #tabletgate. The Internet was soon full of posts about the Surface Pro issue, along with photos and clips from the past year showing NFL players throwing their Surface Pros in frustration. Not because the tablets were malfunctioning mind you, just because they happened to be handy while the players were venting.

Like the wireless network-caused issue during Sunday’s AFC Championship game, from a PR perspective it doesn’t matter that Microsoft’s tablets themselves didn’t fail — it was still the Surface Pros that the public saw taking the brunt of things.

At this point, I’m sure Apple would fully agree with the old saying: “You can’t buy that kind of advertising.”

To recap: at this point, for its $400 million, Microsoft has had two seasons of the Surface Pro being the Official Tablet of the NFL. During that time, the Surface Pro has repeatedly been referred to on national TV as an iPad. Multiple clips have gone viral of NFL players tossing or hitting Microsoft Surface tablets in frustration (they clearly aren’t iPads in those videos). And in a highly visible playoff game, the Surface Pro was singled out in front of a record-setting national TV viewing audience as being the cause of the sideline issues that hampered New England Patriots coaches.

I’d say that the $400 million Microsoft spent has been money well spent — for Apple and the iPad.

As of this writing, Brad Moon did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.

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Brad Moon has been writing for InvestorPlace.com since 2012. He also writes about stocks for Kiplinger and has been a senior contributor focusing on consumer technology for Forbes since 2015.


Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2016/01/microsoft-spent-400-million-promoting-ipad/.

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