The second Microsoft commercial with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.
Via John Gruber:
I don’t get it.
Neither do I. I still have no idea what this is supposed to communicate. It seems to be saying that Gates and Seinfeld are completely out-of-touch with reality, and they’re trying to connect with normal people again. This implies that Microsoft hasn’t been connecting with normal people for a while and it’s something they need to work on. (Which is probably true.) But then the slogan at the end says that Microsoft is good at connecting people.
Apple’s commercials are full of direct comparisons to Windows PCs and reasons why Macs are good. The iPhone commercials are even better: they just show the product’s real interface doing real tasks. It’s telling that Microsoft isn’t discussing, showing, or even mentioning their products at all in these new commercials that are supposedly the “answer” to the Apple ads.
But they’re just confusing. I can’t imagine that Microsoft is accomplishing… whatever it is they were trying to accomplish.
The real message here seems to be, “We have no idea what we’re doing.”
And that’s certainly coming through clearly.
With this video, I’m actually starting to get into these Microsoft ads.
What does Microsoft need to accomplish with these ads? They don’t need to make some “nuh uh” ads to go up against Apple’s. They don’t need to explain to people what Microsoft is or what it does. They don’t need to talk about the benefits of XP or Vista. They need for people to engage with them. They need to take themselves a lot less seriously. They need to shake things up.
The first two clips seem to follow “The Opposite” philosophy from Seinfeld compared to the Apple commercials … and they are getting a lot of viral attention because of it. Imagine how skewered they would be if they just plopped Seinfeld in as the Justin Long character in the same format as the Apple commercials … THAT would be a flop. In the last week, their first video in their official YouTube channel got almost 750,000 views and had everyone talking about the commercial as the worst commercial ever. I can almost guarantee that they couldn’t be happier with that result.
Microsoft knows the audience. The audience is watching a video on a Google subsidiary in a Firefox Browser on a Mac (or that might just be me). One thing you can’t tell that audience: how a PC is better than a Mac. If I were in their marketing departments, I wouldn’t be trying to call out Apple, I’d just get the Apple crowd talking about Microsoft.
This $300 million campaign - or better yet, this “significantly less than 10% last quarter’s Net Income” campaign - lets Microsoft stop being Microsoft for five minutes. That’s why I think they’re on to something.
