BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

How Microsoft’s Surface Beat Apple’s iPad In One Crucial Area

Following
This article is more than 4 years old.

Depending on your frame of reference, Microsoft’s Surface devices are either taking on Apple’s MacOS family, working on brand new form factors, or challenging the iPad and iPad Pro. Looking at the later, it’s clear that the Surface is outperform the iPad in one crucial area.

Advertising.

A recent study by iSpot.tv of TV advertising in the US, focused on the spend and exposure of major brands, including Microsoft with the Surface and Apple with the iPad. VentureBeat’s Eleanor Semeraro has more, starting with the iPad:

"Although the iPad was the product Apple pushed the most on TV last year, there have been only two main windows of activity: during January, when a single ad ran up 824.8 million impressions with an estimated spend of $26.4 million, and again in late November through the present, with two versions of the same heartwarming holiday ad, one in Spanish. The English-language spot saw an estimated outlay of $22.4 million and generated 355.6 million TV ad impressions… the version in Spanish had a much smaller estimated outlay ($210,700) and 20.8 million impressions…”

As for the Surface brand, Microsoft bet big on TV advertising:

"One of the biggest tech spenders on TV advertising last year was Microsoft, specifically for its Surface brand. The company spent an estimated $219.1 million on ads for the product, an 18.76% increase year over year.”

The report also notes that much of the spend for these two companies, and others, was on sports, an area where the audience is unlikely to skip over the adverts or switch away to another challenge because of the live nature of the event.

Apple focused its advertising on two specific times, late January and late November - in time for the post-Christmas sales and the joint Black Friday and Christmas sales. Microsoft’s spend was much more spread out over the year.

How much difference did it make to sales? That’s probably a harder question to answer. Certainly Apple’s tablet is generating more revenue with an estimated $21 billion in sales during 2019, while the Surface revenue increased 23 percent on around $5-$6 billion sales.

While Microsoft’s return is not as high as Apple’s it is clear that Redmond is playing its best hand with the Surface hardware. It’s also using the Surface as a gateway into Microsoft’s cloud services, including Office 365. That’s an area where it matches Apple’s approach, although Apple has a number of opportunities to build more services momentum if it takes some bold steps.

Now read the latest headlines in Forbes’ weekly Apple Loop column…

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website