We're Really Very Small And Local And Cute And You Will Believe That Even If It Costs Us $130M

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away Seattlest worked our first ever job. It was at an Italian beef sandwich restaurant and if you don't know what that is we forgive you. A lot of people grew up similarly deprived and, well, healthy. Our paychecks were on the order of $50 a week for slinging said beef sandwiches ("you want that dipped? How about a pizza puff on the side?") which at the time we considered all the money we'd ever need. This was back before Seattlest was an everything-wanter. The advertising budget for this restaurant ran somewhere around double our paycheck and that money bought an ad in the local newspaper which appeared weekly (alongside Seattlest's incisive coverage of local high school athletes, it should be noted).

The restaurant was called "Feeb's" which is "beefs" backwards, sorta. That was a small American business. Microsoft Corp. is a large American business. You could say "huge." Microsoft is embarking on a $130 million advertising campaign to shed its image as a huge American company, though, despite the fact that only a huge American company would spend that kind of money to change its image to something more tolerable to fragile geek minds. No shit, $130M.

The campaign, using television, print and the Internet, highlights Microsoft's education and economic development projects in 32 countries, including France and Taiwan, according to group advertising manager Mike Lucero. Actor William Macy of the movie "Fargo" narrates the ads.

"We are often perceived as a huge American company," Lucero said Friday in an interview.

We're not sure exactly how many foreign simpletons $130 million worth of William H. Macy is going to convince to look at Microsoft as a benign little helper, but Seattlest's crack financial team estimates that Redmond will be spending nearly $40M a head. Again, that's a rough figure.