We’ve all seen a lot of Dell commercials over the years, and let’s face, they’ve been as exciting as watching paint dry. The “Dell Dude” commercials were funny in the short term, but irritating in the long term. Dell has never tried to be hip or cool, and that’s for good reason: their products haven’t ever really been hip or cool. People have tended to buy Dell products because they provide good value for the money, not for how they look. Over the past couple of years they’ve started to change that with their XPS line of gaming and performance machines, and recently they’ve really kicked it up a notch with their launch of new Inspiron laptops and desktops. The laptops in particular have a nice “wow” factor with a choice of eight different colours, three different screen sizes, and all of the customizations Dell offers (CPU, RAM, etc.). But here’s what really caught my attention: I was watching a show on the SPIKE TV network and check out the commercial I saw:
Dell Inspiron Commercial
Uploaded by jasondunn
That’s completely unlike anything Dell has ever done in terms of marketing, and I think it works really well. Finally, a Windows PC maker trying something different! Catchy song, memorable video, and it shows just enough about the product to entice you to visit the site and check it out. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the Intel blurb at the end – it takes some of the shine off the commercial with that old and tired four-tone Intel branding. Dell mentioned Intel in the commercial, I don’t see why Intel had to also have their lame plug in there. Still, I think it works – what do you think?
Awesome track selection too — from The Flaming Lips’ new album. Gotta love taking a page out of That Other Computer Manufacturer’s book in that regard. 😉
(Well, their newest album. Not exactly new — came out in ’06.)
I’ve always described those other guys as expensive, slightly cooler looking, running an alt. OS, Dells.
If they’ve got something similar ads coming down the pipes their sales will do well.
Works for me. You very well might have set me up to be suspicious or critical, but no; I actually found myself grinning a time or two, and that could have been because you made me aware, hey–this is Dell doing this! I hate commercials in general, but yeah, I liked it.
Oh, and in case anyone is curious, the song is “The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)” – you could have just told me the song title Janak, I had to listen to ten track samples on the Zune Marketplace before finding it. 😉
Hi Jason
Trust you saw we linked to you yesterday over at direct2dell. So today, I just wanted to drop by and say thanks for the feedback. Also glad you liked the “wow” factor on the new laptops with all the colors….did you like the xps m1330 too :-)?
We appreciate your views and glad you found this was a little better than drying paint.
By the way, I love photography too…so Im checking out your other site.
Thanks for stopping by Richard – no, I hadn’t noticed that you had linked to me off Direct2Dell. Thanks for that – and thanks for not sicking the Dell lawyers on me for uploading your commercial, that shows a great understanding of how things work on the Web today. I wish more companies had that understanding.
Regarding the XPS M1330, I happen to have ordered one, but it will be almost a month until I get it so at the moment all I can do is look at the pretty pictures and read reviews written by other people. I wish all the coupons Dell has been hurling at me over the past two weeks could have been used for the XPS M1330, but such is life. I’ll be writing about the XPS M1330 on one of my Web sites, Digital Media Thoughts (www.digitalmediathoughts.com) when it finally arrives.
– Jason