AllThingsD » Burger King

Microsoft's Billion Dollar Media Bailout Plan

Peter Kafka — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:13:41 +0000

The advertising recovery is already in the works, but this could help move it along quite nicely: Close to a billion dollars in marketing money, courtesy of Microsoft.

That’s what Steve Ballmer and company will spend to push two big consumer tech rollouts in the coming months: Windows Phone 7, its attempt to claw back share from Apple and Google, and Kinect, its attempt to push its Xbox 360 platform past Sony and Nintendo.

Redmond’s plans for its phone rollout will reportedly involve more than $400 million in marketing efforts. And Kinect, a motion-sensor add-on for the Xbox, will be a half-billion-dollar project, says the New York Post’s Claire Atkinson. Here’s where some of that money will get spent:

Burger King promotion
Pepsi promotion
Kellogg’s cereal promotion
YouTube homepage takeover
Ad buys on Nickelodeon, Disney sites
Ad buys on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” and Fox’s “Glee”
Ad buys on Time Inc.’s People and InStyle
Times Square event

And here’s some free media–video of Microsoft showing off Kinect at the D8 conference in June, when the company was still calling it “Project Natal”:

[ See post to watch video ]

[Image credit: popculturegeek]

When the Customer Is in the Neighborhood

Diana Ransom — Mon, 17 May 2010 07:00:48 +0000

Restaurant promotion is going high-tech.

Franchise restaurants have long tried to drum up business on the local level with newspaper ads and with mass mailings of coupons and other promotional offers.

But now franchisers have a host of new ways to drive business to individual stores, thanks largely to the explosion in recent years of technologies that recognize a user’s location.

Among others: Burger King Holdings Inc. (BKC) is test-marketing an iPhone application that helps users find its restaurants and view local deals, and Quizno’s Corp. and Applebee’s International Inc. are readying similar apps.

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Subservient Chicken, Whopper Freakout Come to BK.com

Andrew LaVallee — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:10:00 +0000

Burger King (BKC) has redesigned its primary U.S. site, BK.com, to feature well-known but long-gone ads such as “Subservient Chicken” and “Whopper Freakout.”

The site, which emerges from beta today, will still provide corporate information that it’s hosted in the past, such as nutritional information, menus and restaurant locators, but it adds the ability to dial that back and increase the video content, or vice versa.

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Pink-Slip Thursday at Cisco

John Paczkowski — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:00:55 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Do You Have a Reservation at the Virus Bar or Are You Here for the All-Day Workshop on Printer Drivers?

John Paczkowski — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:08:34 +0000

Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) have long competed for market space. And soon they’ll be competing for retail space as well.

In remarks at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference today, COO Kevin Turner said Microsoft has settled on a location for the retail stores it announced earlier this year: Within spitting distance of Apple stores. “We will have some retail stores that are opened up right next door to Apple stores this fall,” he said.

There goes the neighborhood, right? Anyway…

So Microsoft is going to play McDonald’s (MCD) to Apple’s Burger King (BKC). Makes sense. Apple’s retail locations are very well chosen. Microsoft, if it’s going to go this route, would be wise to have stores there as well. As economic theorists Charles ReVelle and Harold Hotelling once observed, “The best position for a new vendor is back-to-back with the well-positioned first vendor, allowing an even split of the market. Any other position of the new vendor would have given that new entrant a smaller market share.”

And one could argue that Redmond might benefit from a retail presence that brings all its wares together in a single “shopping experience”–Windows, Xbox, Zune. All that partner hardware. Surface. Put a Project Natal booth at the back of the store to draw foot traffic and who knows what might happen?