Update at 8:50 a.m. PDT: The video has now disappeared from the ad agency's site as well.
Earlier this week, we were all rather intrigued by the appearance of a Microsoft ad, in which a wife borrows her husband's laptop and suffers a technicolor nightmare when she espies a site that he has been, um, enjoying.
By Wednesday night, however, Microsoft had second thoughts about the pulling power of puke.
The ad has been pulled from the IE8videos channel on YouTube. It's also has been removed from the BrowsefortheBetter.com site, which is part of the ad campaign. The vomit ad's slot has been replaced by a tag that says "coming soon."
This could have meant that a new ad is coming soon, or that the upchuck was uploaded too soon.
The truth is that Microsoft wasn't 100 percent happy with vom-com.
"We make a point of listening to our customers," a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail Thursday morning. "We created the OMGIGP video as a tongue-in-cheek look at the InPrivate Browsing feature of Internet Explorer 8, using the same irreverent humor that our customers told us they liked about other components of the Internet Explorer 8 marketing campaign. While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it."
Although many CNET commenters on Wednesday thought that the ad was funny, some criticized the piece as condoning surfing for porn (shame, shame, shame), as well as the generally less than perfect taste associated with yellow stuff exploding from a nice-looking lady's mouth.
However, Bradley and Montgomery, the agency responsible for the whole campaign--which features Superman actor Dean Cain--still proudly displayed the ad on its own site as of early Thursday morning.
And so it should. The ad has already created exactly the aftereffect for which the agency likely hoped.
But, as so rarely happens, I spoke too soon. Here we are at 8:50 a.m. PDT Thursday, and the ad has now been removed even from the Bradley and Montgomery site.
Even though the wife in the ad might, one feels, stand by her man, it appears the agency has decided not to stand by its ad.
Editor's note at 10:25 p.m. PDT: Since this blog was published, the video has been removed from the hosting pages. But this copy of the video remains on YouTube.
I know a girl who gets somewhat uptight when she's in the passenger seat of a car going any more than 70 mph. However, put her on some insane roller coaster, and she's just fine.
The driving dangers are real, you see. Whereas the roller-coaster ride just feels wonderfully stomach-turning.
And so it is with this charming new online ad for Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft. In most of its advertising, Microsoft has rarely reached 70 mph. But someone, somewhere deep within Microsoft, finally had the craving for the roller coaster.
Here we have a couple at the breakfast table. The husband is examining his laptop. It is not a Mac.
His wife asks to borrow his laptop for a minute. To be fair, shortly before she does this, she shows all the symptoms of being a little stressed. Her lips are tight. Her eyebrows seem even tighter.
She looks at her husband's screen. She is surprised at what she sees and says: "What's this?" Then her body begins involuntary motions. Will an alien being pop from her stomach, leap onto the table, and begin to sing a Celine Dion number?
Will she turn toward her husband, enraged at what she has just seen and assail him with words and fists and spittle and quotes from Joan Crawford?
Not quite.
In fact, she turns away from the kitchen table, not wishing to soil his PC. And then she vomits.
Yes, she vomits. She pukes. She throws up. She upchucks. She phones Huey and Ralph down the big white telephone. (This last phrase is peculiarly English. You need to say the words "Huey" and "Ralph" with an echoing timbre.)
Her vomit is yellow, powerful, and a decent, if distant, relative of the turbo-charged green liquid emitted by Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." Although, truly, one wonders what there really could have been on that screen to make her do so. Most wives have surely seen it all.
Still, her husband, the sinful, disgusting, smug pervert, slips on the vomit as it hits the kitchen floor.
What could possibly happen after all this drama? Does Superman turn up? Actually, he does. In the shape of actor Dean Cain. Dean, who appears unaffected by the detritus at his feet, asks, "Do you suffer from OMGIGP?"
This acronym, for those of you still in control of your diaphragm, stands for "Oh my god, I'm gonna puke."
Superman then goes on to explain that IE 8 has InPrivate Browsing while the husband, still prostrate on the kitchen floor, is privately adorned with even more of his wife's mellow yellow.
As the wife wipes her chin, all I can think about is that Superman's turtleneck is yellow too--and that, even a year ago, no one would have ever expected Microsoft to make a spot like this.
This work is not, as some have surmised, the work of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency responsible for both the "I'm a PC" and Gates-Seinfeld campaigns. It is the brainchild of Bradley and Montgomery, the folks that brought you the Mojave Experiment.
The vomit ad is one of a series, all featuring Cain. The series is taglined "Browse Better," and like the Mojave project, it has its own site, BrowsefortheBetter.com.
Interestingly, and perhaps, for some, ironically, the BrowsefortheBetter site says that for every download of IE 8, the company will donate 8 meals to Feeding America, an organization trying to stop hunger in the U.S.
Of course, some will say of this vomiting ad: "Out, damned spot." Harry McCracken of Technologizer has already dubbed it as "Worst. Tech. Commercial. Ever?"
I will say this. Microsoft has realized that it needs attention. It is finding many and varied ways of doing so. In this case, I suspect that someone has said in a long, long marketing meeting: "Hmm, maybe snot-nosed, filthy T-shirted, gross-out humored, socially inept children really do have an influence."
A little while ago, I was working with a client who wanted to change his very large company's brand name.
His greatest concern was that the new name should make for a simple URL.
I wondered whether it wasn't more important that the brand name should be memorable. Isn't that where it all starts? And ends?
I was reminded of this conversation Tuesday when I arrived in Austin, Texas. By chance and a glass of viognier, I encountered a photographer who wanted her work to enjoy a wider audience. She gave me her card, headlined by her URL: CourtneyChavanell.com. Which, given that Courtney Chavanell was her name, appeared to be appropriate.
(Credit: CC ChrisDlugosz/Flickr)However, I secretly wanted to tell her to change her name like actors do- because Chavanell is tough to remember. She said the key to her work was optimism, so I wanted to suggest that she change her professional name to Courtney Optimist. Everyone would remember that, URL or not.
There was a time when people thought URLs were the key to getting hordes to throng your site. Make it short, have one of the most important keywords--sex, free, go, eat, my, and porn being examples--and your fortune was made.
People still try to trade the most simple URLs for hopeful hundreds of thousands. They will still line up in the hope of getting a vanity URL from Facebook.
But don't most people simply go to the little search box, type in the name of what they're looking for, and search?
If it's something they want to go back to, they'll bookmark it. But they won't remember what the URL is. For the simple reason that they don't need to. The Bingoogle fraternity does it for them.
Indeed, in Japan, a country so often so clever about these things, the trend in advertising is not for companies to slap their URLs three feet high in the bottom right of the ad--it's to have search boxes with suggested search terms.
Every time I see a URL in an ad that tell you to go to COMPANY NAME/special offer or some such, I wonder if there's anyone who would ever do such a thing.
Perhaps there are those generic words that people absent-mindedly type, perhaps just out of boredom. I don't know, URLs like kitchen.com. Or music.com. But could this still be a significant number?
How many people really do bother to type URLs these days?
Just wondering.
It's one thing to go and play with LeBron James. It's quite another to face Bruce Manley.
Perhaps you are not yet familiar with the name. Manley is something of a YouTube cult hero for his rather picturesque basketball trick shot skills.
Somehow, Shaquille O'Neal, the newest Cleveland Cavalier, saw the video. Apparently, his ego was piqued even more than when he saw Orlando's Dwight Howard claim to be Superman.
So what did the NBA's king of social networking do? He Twittered a challenge to a HORSEing duel.
"i wanna play this guy n horse for a thousand dollars, find him pls http://bit.ly/CK5nk," read Shaq's tweet.
According to the HoopDoctors.com, Manley has accepted Shaq's challenge and the contest should happen some time in July. So I really would encourage everyone to look at the YouTube video I have embedded.
If you are not utterly astonished by his tree-point shot, then your emotions have left you for another woman. And, yes, I said tree-point shot--no spelling mistake.
As for the shot Manley hits totally blind from behind a wall, well, if that isn't extraordinary talent then I am the new chief executive officer of the Golden State Warriors.
Will Shaq be able to compete against this kind of ability? It will be very interesting which H-O-R-S-E rules they choose to play. But, if I were a betting man, and perish the thought, I would be betting Manley.
Unless, of course, there's some very fine editing going on here.
In death, there is retail life.
Michael Jackson was an icon, so, somewhere along the way, there will be those who will want to capitalize on his passing.
Drifting through eBay's pages, one sees that many who seem to be bowing their heads in respect may actually be stooping to fairly venal lows.
Take the staggering swiftness of enterprising seller JanisK56, who put a lovely item of memorabilia up for sale Thursday, just before it was confirmed by TMZ that Jackson was no more.
This seller offered, as a one-day special, a 2003 People magazine cover featuring the singer.
(Credit: CC Asim Bijarani)Did the cover feature a triumphant world tour? Or perhaps a family reunion? Not quite. The headline is "Did he do it?" and it features an eight-page analysis of child molestation allegations.
"Will Others Come Forward?" asks the cover. Which is what I was wondering when considering who else would want to sell such mindlessly inappropriate memorabilia to people who might be fans. At the time of writing, the leading bid for this cover is $11.50. Which might strike some as $12 too much.
If that doesn't make you feel a touch queasy, several sellers are attempting to capitalize on pristine editions of yesterday's New York Times. Some, like AFlowerandagun, even add lines to remind you why you should spend cash to buy this paper.
"This is a historic day," declares AFlowerandagun's subhead. But is it really so historic and moving a day that you can't help but try to make $15.50 (the leading bid as I write) on a copy of a newspaper?
Then there's Erickdigger, a seller who is offering a "Michael Jackson life mask." Yes, not a death mask, a life mask.
The seller explains: "This started with an actual life cast mask of Michael Jackson. Then it has been sculpturaly (sic) enhanced by me Erick Erickson.The Hair, ears and eyebrows have been added to create a very lifelike display." And he concludes: "It's like having Jacko right there with you."
The price for Jacko's life mask is $44.99.
I fully understand that many people around the world are moved by Jackson's death. But to write a line like "It's like having Jacko there with you" seems tantalizingly insensitive.
Then again, how might fans feel about the "Michael Jackson Poseable Doll"? This seller, Deathcall47 (really) is offering a Jackson doll from the 1980s still in its box. Deathcall47 leaves a note, so that you can be clear what he is feeling.
"1984 MICHAEL JACKSON POSEABLE DOLL A MUST HAVE FOR ANY JACKSON FAN. SORRY TO HEAR ABOUT HIS DEATH. THIS IS A VERY HOT ITEM FOR ANY FAN," he begins. And he concludes with: "YOU WONT BE SORRY WHO KNOW'S (sic) WHAT THIS IS GOING TO BE WORTH."
The leading bid at the time of writing is $250. I wonder if it's a fan or a mere capitalist.
Jackson's death is extremely sad. But isn't there also something a little sad about people who hear about his death and think they can make a few random bucks from it, regardless of what it is they have to sell? All the sellers I have mentioned put the items up for sale either Thursday or Friday.
Of course, one shouldn't be surprised. But one can only hope that fans, in their grief, will distinguish between the valuable, the sincere, the opportunistic and the utterly callous.
It would be interesting to hear what fans might think of the eBay seller named cadzdaman.
He is offering the domain name MJ-IS-DEAD.com.
At least his message is very straightforward: "Domain name to inform those of Michael's tragic death, or can be resold for a profit."
Indeed. The leading bid as of Friday 12:52 p.m. PDT was $0.99.
The people have googled. The people have binged.
And still there is no sign of the one thing the world needs most: a picture of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's Argentinian lover.
(Credit: CC Mark Licht Notions Capital.com/Flickr)According to Fox 5 in New York, "maria belen shapur photo" was one of the top searches on the Web of intrigue Thursday. And according to Google Trends, "mark sanford mistress photo" rounds out the top 10 Google searches at the moment. Yet no trace has been found of the governor's taste in clandestine lovers.
It is a little sad that the media is pitching its large and very moral tent outside Ms. Shapur's Buenos Aires apartment. Somehow, affairs of the heart don't always seem the most appropriate subjects for public conjecture. It's just that they're so deeply exciting that we cannot prevent our more fundamental instincts from taking over.
So I prefer to think of this as a technological exercise, a mixed martial-arts battle of the search engines.
Will Google have it first? Will Bing's decisive algorithm slap its more vaunted rival across the chops and proclaim triumph? It may only be a matter of milliseconds. But in the search business, milliseconds count.
I bet you just can't wait.
I've never died, but I can't imagine it to be a terribly enjoyable experience.
So I can't imagine why death's proximity might encourage someone to go on working until they are grimly reaped.
That seems to be the case with Steve Jobs, however. His work seems to be his life. The Apple logo seems to be his heart. And, even with several bites taken out of his health, he appears to want to carry on being Apple until he enters the second life.
The hopeful, perhaps mythical one, rather than the virtual one.
After his pancreatic cancer surgery in 2005, Jobs gave a speech to Stanford University students who were about to embark on their own journeys through life's inequities.
He told the audience: "Remembering I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
I was always told by those who claimed to know (which would be people at Microsoft) that Bill Gates was an obsessive, ruthless automaton whose need to crush all before him (in a business sense) was limitless.
Yet somehow this supposed machine in a man's body decided to unplug his working life at Microsoft while he still had his health and to dedicate himself to philanthropic pursuits. He even managed to laugh at his own supposedly cold persona in a couple of excellent ads for his old company.
It all makes one wonder whether Gates would have bothered to return to work, if a life-threatening illness had befallen him.
Some might say that when he walked into a calming sunset, Gates had nothing left to prove, while Jobs still has.
To which my question would be: "What?" He's been largely responsible for directing technological innovations beyond many people's imaginations. But much as one might love what he has created, at heart these are only gadgets.
They cure nothing but boredom. They take time just as much as they make it. And while they help people communicate with each other, they also contribute to helping people be a little more obsessed with their beautiful selves.
Is spending your time creating another lovely gadget as valuable, as enjoyable, as satisfying as, say, wafting up Mount Kilimanjaro? Is it as challenging as waking up in the morning, looking out at the dawn and having no idea what you might do today?
Of course, now that Jobs has been declared healthy, the worldly and the wise have felt free to write of his supposedly old-fashioned, dictatorial management style, even, in the same Harvard Business Publishing article, his utterly disrespectful attitude to parking.
At the core, though, is one man's heartfelt need to continue making gadgets. You can call it art. You can call it obsession. You can call it madness. Perhaps it's all three.
It's time for a test. Is there anyone out there who is not familiar with the term "420"?
For those who may have been on a secret government mission to confirm Pluto's existence, legend has it, or at least one of the legends, that referring to pot as "420" started in San Rafael, Calif., where a group of schoolkids met to puff after school ended--which was 4:20 p.m.
Anyway, there seems to be a man in Quincy, Mass., who may not have thought that the police might be familiar with the term.
(Credit: CCEl Pablo!/Flickr)You see, according to a report in the Patriot-Ledger, police say 30-year-old Christopher Gray put an ad on Craigslist that read in part: "420 help is here."
He then allegedly followed that up with: "Give me a ring if you need some help."
Unfortunately, he seemed to be in an area where police are so fond of reading Craigslist ads that they have learned the secret code. For a detective allegedly called and asked if he might please avail himself of a little quarter ounce.
You can guess the rest. Well, perhaps not. According to Capt. John Dougan, Gray was allegedly fearful when he met the detective and his partner in a parking lot that these purchasers might be members of law enforcement.
How they allegedly satisfied him of their innocence is not recorded. However, according to the good Captain, Gray allegedly said: "Well, I trust you. You look normal."
A transaction then allegedly ensued that would net Gray $45 and an arrest.
Some readers might be a little surprised that police might go to this kind of trouble. Just a brief perusal of the Craigslist San Francisco site Tuesday night yielded ads such as this, which seems as if it might have something to do with marijuana. And for many, this seems entirely normal.
So perhaps the saddest part of this tale comes from Capt. Dougan: "It goes without saying that we will continue monitoring Craigslist."
When you're going through difficult times, perhaps it's wise to reach for a gay foreigner in a mesh T-shirt.
This, at least, seems to be the strategy for MySpace.
The company has divested itself of a considerable number of employees in the past week and is, perhaps, hoping that Sacha Baron Cohen and his extremely tight hot pants will sprinkle a little glitter where the sun has not shone for a while.
"Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt"--the "fake working title" Cohen gave his latest movie--represents a considerable investment on the part of MySpace.
MySpace will feature prominently in the movie, according to a report in AdAge. Indeed, the "Bruno" trailer was launched on the site, and the hilarious meinspace.com/bruno has brought a new dimension to social-networking profiles.
While it is delightful to learn from MeinSpace that Bruno is currently looking for "a guy whose skin colour is between butterscotch und camel," you begin to wonder whether Cohen's snigger is hissing happily in MySpace's direction.
The beauty of Cohen's characters is that they are wonderfully forthright and, well, jerks. You laugh at them and with them. Through them, you're laughing at how baldly stupid so many things in life (and so many people) are.
"Borat" was the most vivid incarnation of the Cohen method. But, as "Bruno's" publicity itself declares: "Borat was so 2006." Cohen also did a deal with MySpace when "Borat" was launched. There were special advance screenings, for example, that were open only to MySpacers.
However, it's hard to see that MySpace's image has done anything other than slide like the Kazhak economy over the last three years.
Of course, one movie isn't going to reverse strategic missteps and Facebook's tolerant, cheery coffee bar of friendship.
I can't help wondering, though, whether "Bruno's" embrace of MySpace might leave you with the notion that of course Bruno would be on MySpace. After all, he's ein person you wouldn't exactly want at your first-born's christening.
Cohen, you might think, has the upper hand in the relationship with MySpace. The deal certainly hasn't excluded the current darlings of social networking. On MeinSpace, you can still link to "Bruno's" Facebook page. Indeed, he somehow managed to nab facebook.com/bruno in the recent vanity raffle.
MeinSpace also lets you link to Bruno's Twitter feed, the fabulous Twitter.com/brunovassup. Here's just one Bruno tweet: "Just back from uncle's funeral - had fight mit egomaniac priest - apparently it's rude to ask for ze church wi-fi password during a service."
Bruno's social-networking numbers to date are very interesting. While on MeinSpace he has more than 330,000 freunds, he has only 53,768 on Facebook and 18,515 on Twitter. Might that trend change as he gears up toward the July 10 launch? I suspect not.
One can hardly wait to see how Cohen has inserted MySpace into his opus. However, as always with his movies, whom will the joke be on?
Do you think better of Eminem after Bruno welcomed him at the MTV Movie awards with his bottom?
In fact, don't Eminem and MySpace have quite a lot in common? Put it this way, Eminem's Greatest Hits album was so 2005.
Some intellectuals want to study humanity. Others just want to study humanity's e-mails.
Which can, sometimes, be more fascinating than the people who wrote them.
A couple of researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology seem to be in the e-mail study camp. Or perhaps there was simply nothing better to think about in Melbourne, Fla., recently.
In any case, they took it upon themselves to examine the e-mails sent at Enron, specifically, how the e-mailing patterns changed as Enron was revealed to be channeling the spirit of Bernie Madoff, rather than Bernie Mac or Bernie Kosar.
The researchers, Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes, concluded, according to a report in New Scientist, that e-mailing patterns just might be a rather accurate barometer of your company's innards.
Collingsworth and Menezes thought it might be fun to see whether the pattern of e-mails written at the time of the resignation of Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling in 2001 might carve out a dainty paisley or the Rorschach inkblot of a disturbed dipsomaniac.
They simply looked at who sent e-mails to whom and how many were sent.
What they discovered was that a month before Skilling fell on his letter-opener, the number of active e-mail cliques--the researchers defined them as e-mail groups in which every member had direct e-mail contact with each other--rose from 100 to 800.
Here's the other characteristic that seemed to foreshadow the spilling of corporate o-positive: more messages were sent within these groups to the exclusion of anyone else in the company.
There is one small downside to this kind of research: most organizations won't let you look at e-mail logs because of concerns about privacy, which is totally understandable.
However, I have a fanciful notion, perhaps slightly fueled by the high level of discourse in the tech world, that techies can, in the privacy of their own PC world, discover everything that is electronically occurring in their domain.
So I wonder whether, in the depths of corporate IT departments across the world, there are clever people studying the finely-weaved patterns of their company's e-mail behavior.
Not out of some misplaced, droopy-headed snoopiness. But because, well, there's a recession out there and they need to know whether their employers will still be their employers when the sun rises.
