Lenovo Photos
A skydiver turns on a Lenovo laptop that was tossed from a plane. It must reboot to deploy a parachute.
If your laptop had just seconds to boot up, could it?
PC maker Lenovo turns that question into a life-or-death issue - that is, the survival or demise of a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop - in a new commercial. The 60-second spot, created by Durham advertising agency McKinney, is available online and will be shown in nearly two-thirds of the nation's movie theaters in August.
It features a Lenovo ThinkPad T420s that is flung from a plane flying 12,500 feet above California. A skydiver zooms over in midair and hits the power button on the laptop, which then has 10 seconds to boot up. If it does, a parachute is deployed and the laptop floats to the ground undamaged. The alternative is being transformed into a heap of junk.
Hence the name of the spot: "Boot or bust."
Of course the laptop beats the clock - that's why it's a commercial - and lives to boot up another day. The ThinkPad T240s is one of several Lenovo PCs with Lenovo's RapidBoot technology, which the company boasts boots up a PC in as little as 10 seconds, faster than any other PC on the market.
The spot is the latest installment of Lenovo's "For Those Who Do" ad campaign, with an estimated cost of $100 million, that debuted in May.
Lenovo's PC rivals, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, also launched ad campaigns this year, as the battle for consumers' attention heats up.
Lenovo's ads represent "the first major push for the Lenovo brand in the consumer arena," said Jeff Meredith, vice president of marketing for the U.S., Western Europe and other mature markets.
The traditional strength of Lenovo, which entered the U.S. in 2005 when it acquired IBM's PC business, is selling PCs to corporate America. But it has been reaching out to consumers as well. The company's worldwide PC shipments jumped 16 percent in the first quarter, even though the industry as a whole suffered a 1.1 percent decline. Lenovo's shipments in North America rose 25 percent.
Although the "For Those Who Do" campaign was conceived and executed by giant ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, Meredith said he approached McKinney in search of "creative, nontraditional ideas" that complemented the spots that already have appeared.
"The demonstration we came up with (in the "Boot or bust" commercial) might seem over the top, but for somebody waiting for their computer to boot up, it can feel like a life-or-death situation," said Glen Fellman, group creative director at McKinney, whose 230 employees make it the largest ad agency in the Triangle.
Other ideas that the agency came up with, but eventually discarded, included positioning a Lenovo laptop in the path of an oncoming train. Two computers bit the dust while the final commercial was being filmed, but in both cases, it was because of a malfunctioning parachute, said Lenovo spokeswoman Kristy Fair.
