Many heavyweights in the PC market will be breaking ad campaigns Stateside next week to coincide with the PCExpo show in New York, but two of them in particular, from Compaq and Dell, will be of particular interest to industry pundits. The reigning champion, looking a few pounds heavier and slower on the feet from the absorption of DEC (CI No 3,334), will be unveiling, on June 16, the first work (for which no spend figure is available) by its new ad agency, DDB Needham, as the start of what it hopes will be a corporate makeover. Meanwhile the leaner and meaner challenger, buoyed by another astounding set of quarterly results (CI, No 3,414), will be pulling the wraps, on June 14, from a $70m institutional campaign directed at the business market, where it wants to bolster awareness and presence. The backdrop to the competing campaigns is that Compaq not only claims to have reinvented desktop computing with its latest Presario offering, but says it is now ready to start selling PCs direct, like Dell. A spokesman for the latter company, meanwhile said it had tried running direct and indirect marketing side by side earlier this decade, and the result was confusion among consumers. Dell now carries out about 15% of its sales in association with value-added resellers, basically at the clients’s request.
