Microsoft blows ad campaign

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Absolutely, utterly, flaming typical. 

Let’s examine the content of my last post, praising Microsoft for the bravery of its Seinfeld-led ads.

“Ifind myself thoroughly engrossed by the antics of television’s latest odd couple,”  Said I. “Even Jerry Seinfeld, who I’ve never “got” is acutally making me chuckle, and ten years too late I find I’m no longer a social pariah.”

Microsoft’s response: to immediately drop the surreal comedy and Seinfeld in its latest ad. And this.

“It would have been so easy, and so futile, to have engaged in a tit-for-tat campaign against Apple’s incredibly smug, if succesful, Mac vs PC ads. And Microsoft would have lost, badly.”

Microsoft’s response: to clone John Hodgeman and engage in a tit-for-tat campaign against Apple, going on to tell us what we already knew. That not every PC user is a socially, inept geek and Windows is used by lots of very different folk. 

And finally, “It’s always awkward watching a celebrity flog something they know nothing about”

 Well one out of three isn’t bad. There’s still no mention of Vista though.

 MIcrosoft claims it was always heading this way. Which if we break it down means it was always going to pay Jerry Seinfeld $10 million to appear in two adverts. That it was always going to abruptly change the focus of the campaign after carefully building the foundations for something else entirely. That if the web had thrown a massive love-in for the early adverts, they would have been dropped just the same. 

Yeah, that sounds about right. For the record, the last advert bored me to tears and became exactly the thing I was praising Microsoft for avoiding. To that end, from now on, unless the ads return to something interesting I’m going to do the one thing Microsoft doesn’t want any of us to do – I’m going to stop talking about it.