Big technology companies are selling us obsolete kit. Sorry, but that pad, phone, camera, laptop, Bluetooth, wireless web widget you just splurged half your salary on? More redundant than a manufacturing industry recruitment consultant. And that MP7 player that folds away into the top of a cigarette packet and beams 24 hour music videos onto your neighbour’s garden wall? It’s just so much landfill fodder, friend.
You see, these giants of microchip magic are retailing the stuff they were working on about five years ago and are now busy building gear that will make your latest acquisition look like an egg timer in about eighteen months. That’s how the tech market works and we’ve all bought into this earthbound space race where the winner is the bod with a box more magical than the last expensive doo-dah you bought.
Nevertheless, these modern day alchemists must still battle each other relentlessly to persuade us to part with our income to fund the development of the next pile of beeping implements. So, why on earth is their advertising so utterly lame?
Almost without exception, new technology is marketed with about as much creativity and flair as a discount carpet superstore.
Microsoft has two campaigns running right now – one for Windows 7 and one for their search engine Bing. Unusually for Microsoft, they’ve managed to produce a couple of products that, while clearly not as achingly cool as something with a half eaten apple embossed on the lid, are at least regarded with nods of approval from some quarters. Here then, is their opportunity to raise some positivity for the brand, perhaps gain some credibility (they don’t need the money, that’s for sure) and make up the ground lost in the release of the abysmal Vista. But they haven’t taken it.
The Bing campaign, to be fair, runs with a valid proposition: Google’s results are too clinical, too literal, even too logical. So Microsoft (or their agency) has chosen to show how inconvenient this would be in a conversation. I can see how the premise may well have worked, but the execution is woeful. In order to demonstrate how irritating their competitors are they spend half the spot irritating us. By the time we receive the pay-off, we’re hacked off. They don’t even bother to show us Bing solving the problem using the same metaphor – or indeed at all. By the ad’s climax it has collapsed, with the voice over simply claiming the product is a ‘decision engine’. Whatever that might be.
The Windows 7 work is even more baffling. From its launch, Bill’s Barmy Army tried to convince us that every feature of the operating system was suggested by a punter. Again, a handy (albeit completely untrue) selling point – you recall the ‘Windows 7 was my idea’ work? Well, this has now been replaced with MS punters claiming they only have eight seconds to tell us about a Windows 7 feature. But why? I suppose it makes for short ads, but airtime has never been cheaper and the world’s soup kitchens are hardly filled with Microsoft execs. Is it to show how rapid the product is? If it is, they don’t choose to make that one of the propositions in the ads. I may well be missing a crucial point, but it all smacks of a format built for want of something better. (There’s also one unintentionally hilarious execution explaining the simplicity of deleting one’s browsing history – in case one has been shopping for a surprise gift. Surprise gift? Okay, right.)
And before every Apple snob becomes animated, their advertising is hardly leading the pack either. After some really smashing spots for the i-pod around five years ago and some so-so work with Mitchell and Webb to follow, they now appear to have gone for some lowest common denominator output hinging on the line ‘There’s an app for that’. Hardly the kind of cutting edge messaging we’ve come to expect from the gurus of trendy, glassy tech. And with Subway running an almost identical strapline for their sandwiches, it has all started to look more than a little trite.
If 2.0 hardware and applications have been created to leave us gawping in awe, like a seventeenth century shepherd stumbling across a pot of hair gel, then the means by which the life-changing advantages of these matt black mechanisms of wonderment are presented to us should really do the same. Instead, I find myself infinitely more impressed by the Specsavers Lynx spoof, than by anything relating to screens, searches, software or servers.
And I don’t even wear glasses.
Nevertheless, these modern day alchemists must still battle each other relentlessly to persuade us to part with our income to fund the development of the next pile of beeping implements. So, why on earth is their advertising so utterly lame?
Almost without exception, new technology is marketed with about as much creativity and flair as a discount carpet superstore.
Microsoft has two campaigns running right now – one for Windows 7 and one for their search engine Bing. Unusually for Microsoft, they’ve managed to produce a couple of products that, while clearly not as achingly cool as something with a half eaten apple embossed on the lid, are at least regarded with nods of approval from some quarters. Here then, is their opportunity to raise some positivity for the brand, perhaps gain some credibility (they don’t need the money, that’s for sure) and make up the ground lost in the release of the abysmal Vista. But they haven’t taken it.
The Bing campaign, to be fair, runs with a valid proposition: Google’s results are too clinical, too literal, even too logical. So Microsoft (or their agency) has chosen to show how inconvenient this would be in a conversation. I can see how the premise may well have worked, but the execution is woeful. In order to demonstrate how irritating their competitors are they spend half the spot irritating us. By the time we receive the pay-off, we’re hacked off. They don’t even bother to show us Bing solving the problem using the same metaphor – or indeed at all. By the ad’s climax it has collapsed, with the voice over simply claiming the product is a ‘decision engine’. Whatever that might be.
The Windows 7 work is even more baffling. From its launch, Bill’s Barmy Army tried to convince us that every feature of the operating system was suggested by a punter. Again, a handy (albeit completely untrue) selling point – you recall the ‘Windows 7 was my idea’ work? Well, this has now been replaced with MS punters claiming they only have eight seconds to tell us about a Windows 7 feature. But why? I suppose it makes for short ads, but airtime has never been cheaper and the world’s soup kitchens are hardly filled with Microsoft execs. Is it to show how rapid the product is? If it is, they don’t choose to make that one of the propositions in the ads. I may well be missing a crucial point, but it all smacks of a format built for want of something better. (There’s also one unintentionally hilarious execution explaining the simplicity of deleting one’s browsing history – in case one has been shopping for a surprise gift. Surprise gift? Okay, right.)
And before every Apple snob becomes animated, their advertising is hardly leading the pack either. After some really smashing spots for the i-pod around five years ago and some so-so work with Mitchell and Webb to follow, they now appear to have gone for some lowest common denominator output hinging on the line ‘There’s an app for that’. Hardly the kind of cutting edge messaging we’ve come to expect from the gurus of trendy, glassy tech. And with Subway running an almost identical strapline for their sandwiches, it has all started to look more than a little trite.
If 2.0 hardware and applications have been created to leave us gawping in awe, like a seventeenth century shepherd stumbling across a pot of hair gel, then the means by which the life-changing advantages of these matt black mechanisms of wonderment are presented to us should really do the same. Instead, I find myself infinitely more impressed by the Specsavers Lynx spoof, than by anything relating to screens, searches, software or servers.
And I don’t even wear glasses.
