Huge advertising spends: Worthwhile?

The WSJ had a Q&A today with the head of a company that makes hard drives. The main angle was that they’re trying to boost business by making hard drives that look snazzy. (The headline is: “Can A Hard Drive Make a Fashion Statement?”)

Apparently only 4% of computer users back up their data, and most of those have had some bad experience with lost data in the past. So if that’s true, there’s a pretty big market out there. And backing up your data is an extremely good idea. So this corporate honcho guy observes that “We need to go out and market why you’ve got to do it.” Seems obvious enough. But he goes on to say this:

You take someone like Apple. They could spend $150 million to $200 million on a marketing campaign and not blink an eye. I sat there and watched someone propose a $20 million marketing campaign. And we just vomited all over him. Two days later, my CFO and I approved a $950 million research-and-development budget in about 15 minutes, but to spend $20 million on marketing. We just don’t know how to do that. It just drives us nuts. But we’re going to have to get over it.

Part of what’s interesting about this — aside from the fact that he seems to be simultaneously aware of what he thinks his company should be doing and why, yet unable to do it — is that I so rarely read/hear anyone mention Apple’s massive marketing spends as part of the company’s success. Yes its products are innovative and the design and aesthetics leading-edge, etc. But they also market like crazy, and spend a lot of money doing so — 30-second TV ads very much included. (I have no idea, by the way, if the specific figures he mentions are real or made up.)

I guess people don’t talk/write about this because it’s out of step with the current conventional wisdom about the death of advertising and how now we are only influenced by our Trusted Friends and whatnot. I remember interviewing an exec at Apple a couple of years ago (re the iPod) and talking about this specifically, and I was completely expecting him to say “Well a great product like the iPod sells itself.” But when I said something like that to him, he pretty much laughed at me.