Microsoft: Seinfeld ads served purpose
You probably well remember those Microsoft ads from a couple of years ago which showed Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates as buddies. They are truly classic; classic for being spectacularly bad rather than spectacularly good. But they did, apparently, serve their purpose.
Microsoft is doing extremely well at the moment. Windows 7 has taken off in a big way, appealing to both home consumers and enterprise customers, and somewhat burying bad memories of Vista in the process. Bing is also doing well, holding steady in terms of market share and being Microsoft’s best effort at a search engine to rival that of Google. Windows Phone 7 Series looks set to achieve greatness, and Natal is grabbing all the headlines in the upcoming battle of the motion controllers in the game console sector.
However, rewind just two years and things weren’t looking quite so good. Vista was pleasing nobody, and there was a feeling that Microsoft was an old and tired company, struggling to evolve. And it was at that point that Microsoft hired Jerry Seinfeld to star alongside Bill Gates in a series of ads about, well, nothing in particular.
This particular campaign didn’t last long, with two ads being aired over the course of two weeks. And no one liked them. In fact, they were the butt of jokes around the Web, with most people wondering what on Earth Microsoft was playing at. But that wasn’t such a disaster, at least according to David Webster, the chief strategy officer in Microsoft’s central marketing group.
He explained to TechFlash how the ads were designed as “an icebreaker” created from fears that “we would run ads and nobody would notice.” Therefore, the Seinfeld/Gates ads were used to “reintroduce ourselves to consumers” which “would make people lean in a little more closely to see what we were going to next.”
What came next were the first ‘I’m a PC’ ads, and with the exception of that cheesy Windows 7 Party ad, Microsoft marketing has both improved and gotten better results ever since.
The fact is that although the Seinfeld ads are laughable in hindsight, they served their purpose, directing people’s attention towards Microsoft once again. Which is, I guess, the ultimate goal of advertising.
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March 28th, 2010
Microsoft’s advertising has always been embarrassingly bad. I can see signs already that its Windows Phone 7 Series is going to be promoted in a way equally bad as those Vista ads. They began by giving WP7S a spectacularly bad name.
Because Microsoft has a monopoly of the desktop PC, it was able to release a product as rotten as Vista, and get away with it. However, Windows Phone 7 Series will fail, as it is just as bad as Vista, but Microsoft has no existing monopoly in phones, and is only a minor player. A bad Windows Phone product will simply fail, and Microsoft will be forced to withdraw from the phone market.
March 28th, 2010
Nice try Dave, trying to cover for how you criticized MS without mercy back when those ads aired, all because YOU didn’t “get it”.
March 29th, 2010
The Microsoft advertisements were woeful. They deserved to get criticized. The only thing worse than the advertisements was the product itself… Windows Vista.