Looks like Microsoft is back-pedaling on their new ad campaign starring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. A story on Valleywag reports that the ads are being pulled, and that their marketing team is trying to spin a positive face to it.
It seems some got the commercials and others didn’t. I’m going to put myself into the latter category and I see this cancellation as a wise move.
The Valleywag story says:
In a phone call, Waggener Edstrom flack Frank Shaw confirms that Microsoft is not going on with Seinfeld, and echoes his underlings’ spin that the move was planned. There is the “potential to do other things” with Seinfeld, which Shaw says is still “possible.” He adds: “People would have been happier if everyone loved the ads, but this was not unexpected.”
The ads outright sucked. I saw two of them on the air here in the Tampa Bay market. Neither had any real plot and there was hardly any mention of Microsoft at all. The only thing it accomplished was making Seinfeld and Gates look stupid. I kept thinking it might lead into something, but that is bad marketing on Microsoft’s part.
Apple’s ads are short and sweet. They are humorous. Each and every commercial stands on its own and obviously makes the Mac look very good in relation to the nerdy PC. This is the point of the Mac v. PC commercials and they work extraordinarily well. Contrast that with the Microsoft ads which were:
- Too long
- Had no point.
- Barely mentioned Windows
And through all of this, I am STILL seeing the asinine Mojave Experiment commercials running on television. So, in one set of commercials, they do nothing. In the other, they are calling their customers stupid and trying to fool them into using Vista.
Microsoft is grossly out of touch with consumers.
There might be some hope for them, though. The New York Times has a story about the next stage of their marketing campaign that is going to directly take on Apple’s Mac v. PC series.
Some also say that the Seinfeld commercials accomplished what they set out to: to generate buzz. That might be, but if the buzz is bad, is it go good? Are they just trying to lower expectations so that they can more easily entertain us with the next phase of commercials?
It’ll be interesting to see how it rolls out.
So, did you see the commercials? What did you think?
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