Microsoft’s new guerilla marketing tactic: Draw graffiti of the Surface on local car washes [updated]

High prices said to doom Microsoft’s Surface to fourth-place finish

Microsoft (MSFT) has started cranking up its marketing machine for the launch of the Surface this month and the company isn’t just going the normal route of buying billboards in Times Square. Network World‘s Yoni Heisler this week spotted some interesting guerilla Microsoft marketing that involved painting graffiti of the Surface tablet onto the wall of a Chicago car wash. Heisler described Microsoft’s strategy as “bizarre” because the company was”advertising for a product with… no advertised pricing” yet. Heisler also said that the Surface ads seemed ineffective because “it’s not as if ‘Surface’ is a household name associated with Microsoft” at this point. The good news for Microsoft? At least it didn’t compare the Surface to chairs.

UPDATE: The folks over at Neowin have been all over the Surface graffiti for weeks now and they have some additional pictures of Surface wall doodles in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

BGR’s own Raymond Wong also snapped some pictures of much more effective Surface advertising in the New York subway system on Thursday. We’ve graciously posted them below.

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