As I work in advertising myself, this piece of news shouldn’t suprise me: just like all creative work, the latest Microsoft ads by Crispin, Porter+Bogusky have been created on Macs.
It’s quite shallow and biased, but it’s still an interesting reading.
By the way, I don’t blame C,P+B for working on their usual machines, just like everyone in the industry does, but maybe Microsoft could have paid just a little more attention…
Final Burp: An ad is a product. Especially when it’s produced with products from the same category it’s promoting.
So apparently the teasing is over, and here is the real PC campaign:
First, spare thoughts:
It’s Crispin, Porter+Bogusky, but not enough. Unfortunately.
It’s Microsoft, but not too much. Thanks God.
There’s no revolutionary thought behind this: just a brand that makes the world go round showing some newly found pride.
Maybe that’s enough of a revolution. It invites PC users not to be ashamed of themselves, and that’s the first step for Microsoft to regain status.
Of course, it can’t fix Vista. If it sucks, it sucks.
We’ll see where it leads. It’s a thin balance between cool pride and boring boasting, as you can tell if you compare the 60″ cut with the (less intriguing) 30″.
Oh, as of today, evening of the day after the campaign launched, GMT+1, the 60″ cut by DuncansTV (the WindowsVideos channel doesn’t feature it yet) has less than 5.000 views on youtube.
The 30″ cut less than 20.000.
Too little.
Final Burp: a comment from a colleague here at Dare. “This is an ad for Windows, which you can install in a PC or in a MAC (Which is a PC with MacOS preinstalled)”
This is the second episode of a series of Microsoft ads developed by Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. It’s part of a $300M campaign aimed, I think, at connecting Microsoft with consumers, and, as expected, it’s raising a debate in Ad-World
(The debate in the tech-world is generally limited to: Vista sucks! With the option of: Get a Mac!)
You can read AdAge’s cover of the ad here, and if you browse through blogs you can see quite a few people blaming the ad for only casually quoting Windows at the very end of the commercial, but I really don’t think that’s the point: every single shot of Bill Gates, on any commercial, magazine cover or newspaper article, says “Windows” all over the world, so, in ad terms, these long commercials offer plenty of products.
As for me, I really don’t get these ads, and again they seem like a wasted opportunity (as in the case of HSBC), but I have so much faith in Crispin, Porter+Bogusky that I think that, despite every evidence to the contrary, something is up, and this campaign will eventually takes off.
Who knows, maybe they’re seeding lame ads to lower expectations, until the big climax… After all, it’s the same agency that revived Burger King and Volkswagen USA.
Final Burp: With bad news such as Intel’s refusal to upgrade to Vista, Microsoft is in great need of an image makeover, but if CP+B can’t make it, I doubt anyone can.
A couple days ago I was talking with a creative director about how we have often found ourselves giving away ideas and tips to our clients about potential new products, or improvements of old ones: though most of these ideas get lost along the way, sometimes they eventually become financially-relevant products, and all we get out of that is a handshake. If we’re lucky, a “thank you, we’ll not pitch you for a while…”
Fastforward 24 hours, and I stumble upon this article from AdAge, listing a number of agencies that have been addressing this same issue in the most obvious way: by becoming marketers themselves.
They develop and market their own proprietary ideas, thus evolving from consultants to entrepreneurs: from “communication experts” to “idea factories”.
The first implication of all this is quite immediate: money. You need lots of money to finance your ideas, develop and market them, before you can see any ROI. But if you do see a ROI, is much more rewarding than current agency fees.
The second keyword is risk: entrepreneurial risk. Agencies have always been preaching brave risk-taking, but have never really been keen to take any risk themselves. We still hang on to the same structure and business model of the last many decades.
Speaking of that, what kind of structure can support such a business model? Most likely one with a few selected talents and low fixed costs. Which is pretty much the opposite of the agency structure of today: very high fixed costs (lotsa people), but real talents have been fleeing our industry for years, in search for better opportunities and, well, more money.
I’m still gathering the thoughts, but it seems one of those topics worth tracking.
Final Burp: if agencies start succesfully marketing their own products, will clients quit saying that we can’t fucking sell, and we just don’t get figures?
