Microsoft Ad: It Costs $30,000 to Fill iPod

Microsoft has made tons of headlines with its Laptop Hunters series of advertisements. Microsoft has released the latest in its new campaign and surprisingly, it’s not about PCs, but rather media players.

Microsoft hired Wes Moss, a certified financial planner to explain the kind of money you’ll spend trying to fill an iPod with music as opposed to a Zune. The commercial is fairly straight forward. With iTunes' "a buck a song" pricing, you’ll spend $30,000 “filling the latest iPod.” With ZunePass, you can have unlimited music, for $14.99 per month.

However, there’s one tiny problem. The $30,000 versus $14.99 per month argument is all well and good but that assumes the user is starting out with no music library at all. Using Moss’s 120 GB iPod example, it’s hard to imagine someone buying a high capacity MP3 player if they don’t already own tons of music. It also doesn’t factor in peoples’ CD collections, photos, or videos they might want to store on their iPod. 

Moss makes a good point. Who has $30K lying around to spend on music? And as a heavy consumer of music, I’m all for subscription based services. This ad would probably have worked better with one of the lower end iPods purchased by those who don’t have a huge music library and likely would be starting from square one. Then again, Microsoft wouldn’t get to tell you your Apple MP3 player is costing you $30K if they went with the Nano.

Check out the ad here. Oh and for those interested, Engadget points out that Wes Moss was booted off of Donald Trump's The Apprentice in week eleven.