Microsoft Surface street art ad appears in New York
Microsoft's new Surface might not be launching until October 26th, but the company appears to be kicking off its marketing for the Windows RT-powered tablet a little early. A building wall in New York City has been taken …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft has been building toward this launch all summer: the tablet was unveiled at the company's June Surface event, and by August 8th reports said it was already working on Surface 2 successors before the first unit even shipped. The street art lands alongside other brand-refresh moves — a new corporate logo unveiled August 23rd for the first time since 1987 — as Microsoft positions itself for the October 26th Windows 8 and Surface debut.
The timing matters because the backdrop is hostile: IDC's view that Windows 8 will not revive traditional PC growth this year, and a confirmed battle with RIM for third place in mobile behind the dominant leaders. Early out-of-home advertising in New York is Microsoft buying consumer mindshare for a hardware category where it has no installed base.
First-order effects
- Microsoft starts seeding consumer awareness for the Windows RT-powered Surface roughly two months ahead of the confirmed October 26th launch, targeting a general urban audience rather than the developer and press crowd that saw the June reveal.
- The campaign puts Microsoft's own hardware brand in front of New York consumers while its PC OEM partners are still preparing Windows 8 machines for the same date.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent tablet marketers — Apple above all, plus the Android vendors fighting over the rest of the market — now face a deep-pocketed entrant willing to spend on physical-brand advertising before shipping a single unit.
- If the street-art push reads as the opening of a broad consumer campaign, Microsoft's OEM partners must decide whether Surface's marketing halo helps or crowds out their own Windows 8 tablet launches on the same day.
Third-order effects
- Marketing its own hardware at consumer scale marks a structural shift for a company whose historical model was licensing software while partners made the machines — a change that reshapes the Microsoft-OEM relationship if Surface becomes a lasting product line.
- Sustained first-party hardware branding would also harden the third-place-in-mobile contest against RIM into a two-horse race for the 'alternative to Apple' position, with each player's hardware identity doing the differentiating.
The trend: Microsoft is shifting from a licensing-first model to marketing its own branded hardware at consumer scale, with the Surface launch as the test case.