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A couple of days ago, Microsoft threw in the towel and pulled the cryptic Seinfeld / Gates ad campaign. It was a tacit admission that leaving the viewing audience with a collective "WTF?" wasn't exactly the image they needed to project. (Oh, they're claiming that they planned it this way all along, but pretty much nobody believes it.)
Yesterday, they unveiled the new ads replacing them, and they're surprisingly well-done. They hit exactly the right note, not even talking about Apple but going headfirst against the PC stereotype that the Mac ads have so brilliantly set up. The implicit message is that most people are "PCs", not "Macs" -- a very smart tactic to use against the cooler-than-thou Mac image that was already starting to get some backlash. They're also genuinely down-to-earth in a way that the head-scratchingly too-clever-by-half Seinfeld campaign wasn't.
All of which seems to show that, in advertising as in everything else, Microsoft *never* produces a decent 1.0 release. But they do tend to eventually get a clue...
Yesterday, they unveiled the new ads replacing them, and they're surprisingly well-done. They hit exactly the right note, not even talking about Apple but going headfirst against the PC stereotype that the Mac ads have so brilliantly set up. The implicit message is that most people are "PCs", not "Macs" -- a very smart tactic to use against the cooler-than-thou Mac image that was already starting to get some backlash. They're also genuinely down-to-earth in a way that the head-scratchingly too-clever-by-half Seinfeld campaign wasn't.
All of which seems to show that, in advertising as in everything else, Microsoft *never* produces a decent 1.0 release. But they do tend to eventually get a clue...