Microsoft advertising
I generally find the ads from Microsoft to be by turns baffling and infuriating. They often treat you as if you were not too bright and seem aimed at somewhat dense teenage minds. It goes without sayiing that they are misleading; that’s true of many ads. But the “golly gee, isn’t Windows fun” type of approach so often used seems strange for an audience that contains many highly trained and skilled professionals. The other standard Microsoft approach is to bad-mouth the competition. Microsoft has some good products; why can’t it use advertising that tells us about the products instead of using meaningless and hyperbolic stuff like, “The Wow starts now”, or trash talking about the competition. I have posted before about how Microsoft’s disdain for its customers shines through its advertising and I bring it up again because Microsoft is at it once more. At Technologizer, Harry McCracken writes about some Internet Explorer ads:
The commercials star Dean “Former Superman” Cain, and three of them merely suffer from the odd trait–common to about 85 percent of Microsoft ads–of portrying Microsoft customers as being a little less than intelligent, self-respecting grownups.
McCracken gives links to the three clips and then says about a fourth:
Okay, so far reasonable people can disagree as to the merits of these ads or lack thereof. But the fourth ad is so disgusting that I don’t want it playing in the same browser tab as my site if I can help it. Here it is–watch only if you have a strong stomach. It’s vile, and makes me think less of Microsoft as a company for having approved it.
What’s your opinion of Microsoft advertising?
Added later: Here’s what Preston Gralla at Computerworld says:
But one ad that promotes IE 8’s porn mode doesn’t merely cross the line of bad taste — it obliterates it. In it, a squeaky-clean young married couple sit at a kitchen table, and when the husband gets up to leave, the wife asks if she can use his laptop. She does, and obviously sees some kind of grotesque porn on the screen, and begins vomiting, first on the floor, and then on her husband.
Like I said, Microsoft advertising treats its customers as if they all had the mind of a somewhat dimwitted teenager.
Update: Microsoft has pulled the “puke” ad. But as is typical of Microsoft, the public statement shows no sign of acknowledging the initial bad judgement.
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