Tag Archive for ‘microsoft’ at iconogeek

Look, I don’t have as much ire for the Microsoft ads starring Jerry Seinfeld and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates than everybody else seems to. I did get a chuckle out of them. If taken a face value (and in a world where Justin Long and John Hodgman don’t exist), they were OK. Not $10 million OK, and not kick off a $300 million campaign OK..just OK.

Trying an image campaign like this is tough. Apple has succeeded in making Windows Vista look like a pathetic mess through its MAC/PC ads. Curiously enough though - Microsoft Office seems to fair pretty well in image from those commercials. This campaign is obviously trying to play on the hipness of the MAC/PC campaign, but it just can’t match it. When it comes to marketing Apple has always been the lead horse - ever since the 1984 ad, they haven’t stopped (They couldn’t, their market share was so small relatively - and still is - that they needed to separate themselves to survive). I am sure Cesar or Jason (my Windoze-using fellow iconogeeks) will chime in here about the virtues of Windoze, but me and Brett (my fellow MAC-using iconogeek) know the truth…if you use a Mac, you’re just, well, “cooler.”

Trying to make Microsoft look hip by admitting it is out-of-touch with real people just makes it seem desperate. Microsoft is an enormous company with tons of bad-will over the past years and to get past that by dropping Seinfeld in the mix just doesn’t make sense. The fact that Microsoft pulled the ads and is now laying some bullshit about an intended “teaser campaign” is ridiculous. They yanked them because they aren’t working. It doesn’t matter if I felt they were kinda clever, the bottom line is that they didn’t work, and they won’t work. Maybe Microsoft should just concentrate on releasing an OS that doesn’t suck, instead of dropping $10 million on a latex salesman.

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