I've been critical of past Microsoft advertising.
The low point may have been calling customers and potential customers dinosaurs for not upgrading to Office 2003.
But Microsoft advertising, in general, has been at best inconsistent, in that it has often spoken to the needs and desires of Microsoft--as opposed to the needs and desires of its customers. (In all fairness, this is hardly a problem unique to Microsoft's advertising or, indeed, to the advertising that comes out of the the tech industry overall.)
But the company's latest, from the Crispin Porter + Boguksy agency, nails it.
As Philip Elmer-DeWitt summarizes:
Her name is "Lauren," and she's making the Apple (AAPL) guys nuts...She's the young, hip, Volkswagen-driving redhead who stars in the latest Microsoft (MSFT) TV campaign. Told that if she can find a 17-inch laptop for under $1,000, she can keep it, Lauren ends up--to the Mac aficionados' dismay--with an HP (HPQ) running Windows Vista.
The message? Sure, Macs are fine. But who can afford one in these times?
The Apple fan club is up in arms. A lot of the reaction is pretty silly and dwells on the fact that the star of the spot is actually an actress and that the events shown are staged. Shocking and surprising, I know.
As for whether the comparison of the 17-inch Apple and HP laptop is completely fair and apples-to-apples? Well, of course it isn't. We're talking advertising here. There has to be a degree of credibility, yes, but absolute objectivity? Hardly.
Best line: the sighingly delivered, "I'm just not cool enough to be a Mac person."
From an advertising perspective, the commercial does have a weakness. It essentially sets the Mac up as the aspirational brand, the laptop that would apparently be Lauren's first choice, if it weren't for its cost. This ad wouldn't fit especially well with a more free-wheeling era.
But this is not that era. And a value message strikes me as a good one for Microsoft in this context, especially as delivered in a light, humorous, and gently hipster-mocking way.
A few weeks back, I posted about Sony using a 1965 John Dominis photograph to illustrate how "Timing Is Everything." Given that the picture in question could hardly have been taken with a Sony digital camera (which wouldn't exist for decades), I thought it a poor choice to illustrate the technical prowess of Sony's latest digital SLR.
After I wrote the original post, I noticed something else when I was studying the original photograph and the one in the ad; they weren't quite the same. I thought it a slightly amusing oddity but not much more. The differences were fairly clear if you looked at a blowup, but they were fairly subtle at more modest sizes.
In any case, while perusing Time Magazine last week I ran across another ad in the series that caused me to go "Huh?" (I think it was a bit saltier than that but you get the idea.) The ad in Time was clearly intended to show an example of bad timing.
In fact, that's exactly the point of the whole series of ads created for this campaign by BBDO New York. (A third ad is here.) As MediaPost says:
Timing is everything, especially when you're taking pictures. If you've ever wondered what a famous photo would look like had it been taken a second or two later, then you're bound to enjoy this print campaign for Sony's Alpha DSLR-A700 camera. Imagine the construction workers eating lunch atop a steel beam while others were still working. Or a leopard readying to attack a baboon. What would happen if a referee stood in the way of Brandi Chastain's winning penalty kick and striptease?
On the one hand I feel a little silly. I badly missed the point of the ad.
Having said that, I have to give BBDO New York a 2 out of 3 for this campaign. The construction workers and the Brandi Chastain shots are clear examples of bad timing. They're witty ads and unambiguously make their point.
The leopard and baboon, however? It's not as good as the one that Life originally published. But the differences are slight. And, in spite of one or two comments made to my original post, I don't see how anyone could call the shot used for the ad a bad or badly-timed photograph in an absolute sense. I won't argue that everyone else should share my aesthetic opinion but I'm confident that had I taken that picture, I'd have a big enlargement hanging on my wall. And I doubt that I'm alone in that.
So I stand by my opinion that it was a poor choice for this ad--just for different reasons than I initially thought.
(P.S. I don't know if the ads used in the campaign are different shots in the original sequences or if they are Photoshopped versions of the original "good" photographs. I was initially somewhat puzzled when I carefully studied the two Dominis shots (the Life version and the Sony ad version)--because there seemed to be more differences on the baboon side than on the leopard side. Nothing conclusive, but it didn't look quite right to be two shots in the sequence even if I did try to convince myself that the mechanics worked. At the time, it just made no sense to me that someone would have digitally manipulated the photo to make it worse. See also the discussion in the comments. Now, of course, knowing that the whole idea was to have "bad" versions of iconic photographs, deliberately degrading part of the picture makes perfect sense.)
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