Technically Incorrect

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 The vomit ad's slot has been replaced by a tag that says "coming soon."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.