PC Does What!? The Huge $70M Advertising Push To Promote PCs

Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell and Lenovo have teamed up for a PC campaign that would help promote how much better PCs have become in recent years. The group of companies have teamed up to produce a $70 million ad push called the “PC Does What!?” campaign. The campaign, scheduled to begin October 19th, 2015 in the U.S. and China, will include TV commercials on major networks, print as well as online ads. The five participating companies will split the $70 million cost of the campaign, which will run through November in an effort to entice holiday shoppers. This is the first time that we have seen a consortium of big names like this come together on a unified front to help PC sales.

Worldwide shipments of PCs fell by 7.7 percent in the third quarter of 2015 versus the prior year according to research firm Garner. PC makers were hopeful that the release of Microsoft Windows 10 in the third quarter of 2015 would help improve PC sales, but it appears that it had a minimal impact on shipments in the quarter. The good news is that according to a recent Garner survey an impressive 50% of those surveyed planned on buying a new PC in the next 12 months. PC sales are forecast to shrink by more than 8 percent and not stabilize until 2017, according to the latest forecast from IDC.

One of the first advertisements involves PC Gaming and shows that a new PC could perform up to 30x better on 3D graphics than a five year old PC. When Intel released their new 6th Generation Intel Core ‘Skylake’ processors they noted that there are over 500 million PCs that are still being used today that are five years old or even older. Intel and the other companies certainly see this as a key group of users that might be willing to invest in a new PC soon. You can take a look at the ‘PC Gamer’ advert for the PC Does What!? campaign below.

The video was just uploaded to YouTube yesterday and has received mixed feedback from the 35,000 people that have already watched the advert. Another advert called ‘Chopper,’ has a rescue helicopter preparing to take off on a mission and has one team member using a Lenovo Yoga being used, the pilot has an HP laptop with Kenny Loggins’ hit song ‘Danger Zone’ playing on his laptop with ‘state-of-the-art sound’ and finally the person being rescued is using an Dell XPS 13 that has a remarkable 18 hour battery life.

Here are three more adverts that make up the five that have been released thus far:

These ads are clearly aimed at the masses, but the $70 million dollar question is are the compelling enough to give consumers a reason to run out and buy a new device? Intel feels that people are unaware of how much better the PCs are now versus just a few years ago and that the ad push will help enlighten people of the advances just before the holiday shopping season.