Microsoft: Shift away from Seinfeld-Gates planned
The next ad in Microsoft's massive Windows campaign won't feature Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, but the move is part of a planned shift, Microsoft insisted on Wednesday.
An image from the first Seinfeld-Gates commercial.
(Credit: Microsoft)"That was always the plan," a Microsoft spokesperson said late Wednesday. That followed a report on Valleywag that Seinfeld and Gates were getting the boot.
Microsoft had indicated even before the second ad debuted last week that a shift was coming.
In any case, Wednesday's coverage is more bad news for Microsoft, which is banking on this $300 million ad push to help restore Microsoft's image after years of bad press for Windows Vista and relentless attacks from rival Apple.
Reaction to the ads has been largely negative since the first one debuted two weeks ago.
Update: Later on Wednesday, a Microsoft spokesman added this official statement: "We will be executing the second phase of our advertising campaign tomorrow, as planned from the start."
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
Two ads that were only shown a week or two on the net and even fewer on TV and then all of sudden it's never mind! We're doing something else now! Doesn't sound like it's working to me. It was the same thing with Mojave. What happened to that?
Sounds to me like Mojave was plan A. Seinfeld was plan B. and now we're getting ready to see plan C with the overall plan being that MS is going to try lots of stuff. This looks like a brute force ad campaign to me. Try everything until something works.
It's good they have back up plans, but I hope we see something that makes sense before we run out of letters in the alphabet. Maybe if they had a backup plan for Vista we could just avoid all this nonsense.
There's absolutely no doubt that the stitching is coming out of this marketing campaign, and they know it.
I guess this just lets me know that this CNet blog operates within said "plan."
OOPS, that doesn't happen anymore, unless it has a touch screen :D
just kidding.
William Shatner used to shill for Commodore and the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 became the best selling home computers of the 1980's, so you know it works. Now he shills for Priceline.com and it works too!
Imagine, a star trek themed starship fighting klingons... and in the heat of battle you get blue screen of death...
or even better, a spin off "I'm a mac, I'm a PC guy" with same skinny dude as the mac guy and Michael Dorn as PC guy, ripping him apart with a klingon battlecry....
Vista: It might not suck by 2500.
I am not sure what I think about Microsoft's new plans. From what I understand they will put some fat man in a dress and have him run around with a vista banner while lots of people throw water balloons at him. The idea is to promote sympathy for Microsoft and it's poor abused operating systems.
"We know Vista is a bit strange, please don't bash it. Buy it and give it a good home."
Why are they doing this???????
George: Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice that you were looking in my direction.
Victoria: Oh, yes I was, you just ordered the same exact lunch as me.
George: My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents.
Victoria (with a huge smile): I'm Victoria, hi!
Or are you just all talking without any fact or basis for your comments other than the typical rambling of the tech trolls? So far, the second appears to be the case. <p>
I would like to see more of the Bill and Jerry exchange, but can see that having that be the sole focus would be a mistake. None of this is done on the spur of the moment, so I can totally believe that they planned this from the start. I'll be interested to see what they have up their sleeves. And by this time tomorrow, we'll all know.
That's why it's easy to predict. You see?
An ad is made to sell a product, or make peoploe go buy the product. An ad is not out to be cute or esoteric, or to win awards for being "way out".
When you make an ad, where the target audience (ordinary consumers), can't make any sense of it, much less go and buy the product you are advertising, then you have failed woefully in your aims, and are totally wasting the company's money.
Microsoft execs are totally out of touch with reality.
(now where are the other three horsemen of the apocalypse...?)
It was not planned, the ads were stupid and therefore bombing, like someone else said if they were succeeding they wouldn't need some brain-dead marketer to explain the shift.
The fact they're changing their ad strategy changes nothing, because they have nothing worth bragging about! They failed in acquiring Google. They failed in acquiring Yahoo. Zune media players haven't been selling well. The overheated-Xbox 360 gaming machines have seen a decrease in sales which they are barely breaking even on. The Surface computer is ridiculously expensive and does nothing useful for the average consumer, other than to continue the trend of professed "almighty" MS innovation. Windows Vista is an utter flop and doesn't work well for the average non-tech consumer which is a big chunk of the market. Oh and those ridiculous Windows Mojave ads - those people haven't used VIsta for more than a week, and there's something so pro-Microsoft about their attitude after discovering it was really Vista they were using. Yeesh!
At this present moment in time Microsoft is just grasping at straws. They are definitely sinking fast and most likely this3rd iteration of these commercials will probably be more liking to a baseball game than a charm.
It's exactly that attitude that is hurting MS's image. If they want to relate to normal people perhaps they could admit that they make mistakes like every other normal human being on the planet does. Instead, every time they make a mistake they do every dance in the book to skirt around the issue or only apologize for some issue nobody even cares about. The big issues they continue to ignore. Add the robot to that list btw.
Instead of spending all this ad money on even more ads to relate to people they could just say, yeah you know what? It wasn't a planned shift. The ads sucked and we messed up. BAM! No more ads needed and they automatically relate to real people that screw up everyday. Unless of course they don't want to be screw ups, but MS hasn't figured that part out yet.
I don't think they should get into the shoe sales business I doubt it will be any more successful than Ballmer is at convincing IT professionals they should downgrade to Vista.
- by benjwah September 17, 2008 10:41 PM PDT
- Microsoft are ******* idiots. I liked the ads, and I thought they had potential. Of course, it looks like they'll be doing what they do with everything that doesn't work immediately: Losing interest.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 3 pages (65 Comments)I like Microsoft (not as a blind supporter, I also like Apple and Linux), but when they drop things at the slightest hurdle (for instance, the grumblings of the blogosphere), they are extremely frustrating.