Study says Seinfeld ads made MS brand image worse.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm all for "edgy", and I love CP+B's work, but they were competing against Apple, and that means competing against possibly the best advertising machine on the planet. Apple has excellent reputation, they've got beautiful products, they were competing against a heavily-criticized product, and they had a brilliant two-pronged ad plan. Part of their ads only discussed product, and nothing else. No "Let's see people using this." No "Look at people using this in real life." It was, "We've made something beautiful." No more than that. It was the revolving iMac, the Macbook Air in the envelope, the rack of iPod touches, the chromatic Nanos, the many videos of the app store. Emphasis on "groundbreaking."
Meanwhile, they took out a heavy ad campaign against Microsoft. They made entertainment pieces. Slapstick. All of it gently teasing Microsoft. No hard edges: just two funny actors joking around. Even if it was unfair and imbalanced, even if Hodgman was the funnier of the two, it was fun, and it was fun like satire is fun. It didn't make the case that Microsoft was bad, it took that fact for granted.
Against this, CP+B put in an "edgy" ad. Weird stuff with Gates and Seinfeld joking. Only problem is, edgy is good when you've got two equal, generic products. CP+B's Burger King ads stand out because McDonald's has nothing. In this case, Microsoft is bland, but Apple is a hot product. It's one of the most fashionable brands on the planet, and even among hardcore tech geeks, it has a pretty good reputation. (Some people hate it, but some people love it.) Furthermore, it was a big risk, and Apple - seated in a comfortable niche - was able to launch attacks directed at the sole fact that it was a pricy and edgy campaign.
I'm interested in seeing how the "I'm a PC" ads end up doing. They're nice, even if they still have that feeling of Microsoft's avoiding talking about their product - and that, I think, is MS's Achilles Heel right now. They're a nothing brand. They're the biggest but they have no impressive positive reputation. Their computers are designed by other companies, none of which stand out. Apple, meanwhile, has an extremely tight product line and they control every aspect of their product, including ads.
Yeah, Microsoft is the bigger company, but they're at a disadvantage in this campaign. Apple has a definitive image. Microsoft does not.
There's a fine line that can't be crossed to avoid just making it creepy, but I'd like to see, say, Vista, Live Search, Windoes Live Messenger, an Xbox360, and a Zune all in the same ad tied together somehow and everything just working. Make people think "Microsoft = all computers" again the way they used to.
Stuff like 360 and Live Search are hard to integrate together. They're so different! Microsoft would be hard-pressed to unify the two. And that's the problem. Apple has this obsessive integration: you get OS X on the iPhone, you have the same volume buttons on that and the computer, you get visual designs gradually blending through, the featuresets are all called the same things... it's all tight. Microsoft doesn't control that stuff. Apple has the rare ability to be uncompromising in design and get away with it.
With the features they have now, I think Microsoft's best idea is to strip down. Avoid fancy things, deal with the really important thing. We have these great games, we have this evolution-not-revolution interface, each time we make something it's a little bit better. They're the dominant player, so their best bet is playing it safe and trying to outlast Apple. It's still hard, but they've got an excellent team. If they try they can create something good.
But what unalone was saying, it's not about the under-the-hood technical stuff in marketing, it's about a consistent story. If you can't join the dots with the user experience (and don't get me started about Powerpoint, Visio, Word and Excel in their 2008 iterations, with inconsistent look+feel, different behaviours, ribbon/menu inconsistencies) it's hard to sell this story.
Customer loyalty is a similar story - tactility, gorgeousness, smooth transitions from product to product (in an experiential sense, not how well COM+ interaction works) all trump weird unresponsiveness, beige-boxyness and uncomfortable mental transitions.
And perhaps this is one of the key issues for Microsoft - they're a technical organisation that has grown too big for obsessive and fanatical and consistent design to be implemented. MS Marketing must weep, unless they are too close to the issue too.
Okay, for an example. I can create a movie in iMovie, use visual passages created in iPhoto. If I need a song, GarageBand 09 has a special view for coming up with incidental mood music - which Apple itself uses in making its promo videos. When you finish that you can send it to your iPhone through iTunes, and while you're there you can put it up directly for sale. You can burn it to DVD, you can publish it online, and iMovie is designed to export different versions to each program automatically, so it fits the medium each time. Or I can upload it to MobileMe and create an online movie gallery, or have it stream directly to my iPod touch.
Another example. In iTunes, I can drag an album off of iTunes and it immediately copies all the songs. Right click that folder and I can compress it directly from the commands. Drag that folder to iChat and it sends the album. If my friend's on a Mac, that zip folder automatically decompresses on the other side. Or I could open a video chat and we could watch a movie in tandem. Or I could show a photo gallery to him. Or I could access his computer remotely and look at his stuff directly.
It's hard to explain, but it's all these small things that don't integrate well, they integrate perfectly. Name two apps and they'll most likely work together. That includes the best third-party apps.
So for an attempt at a bigger example: I want to make an album cover in iTunes. So I use iPhoto to connect to Facebook and find tagged images of me. I find one I like, and edit it in Preview not just to crop it but to add text. The font/color editors in the Mac are the single best I've ever seen. Once I've got that, I right-click the album in iTunes and move the Preview image to the album, and in as few steps as possible I've downloaded an image, cropped it, added text, and made that the image for that entire album. My iPod touch syncs automatically with iTunes, so suddenly I have a cover that appears there, gorgeously and fit in perfectly with everything else.
For web development, I have something like Coda. I can SSH directly from the app, I can write my code, tweak my CSS, access FTP, and manage a handful of different sites all in one window. There's a built-in web browser, so I've got access to basically everything I need for web development in one place. That's third-party, but that's part of the Mac software sphere.
I've tried before to explain it, but it can't be explained. You only really get it when you've used the Mac long-term and used it to do everything. I use it to download files, watch DVDs, write poetry, organize my thoughts, write papers, send emails, listen to music, organize photos, and as you do it, all of it, you start to understand how brilliant the software is. Things flow perfectly. It's like reading a PDF on Safari. It opens with Preview.app in the browser, loads quickly, feels natural, and if I want to save it I just click a button and it downloads instantaneously. That's not enormous, but it saves me strain and it saves me time. I don't have to worry about PDF links, I can click and have it load right away. There are hundreds of small things like that. I'm certain I don't know them all: I just discovered a neat new feature two days ago regarding Expose. It's wonderful discovering new features constantly because they always come up just as you really need them and don't realize it.
They control the top-notch industries with Final Cut, Aperture, and Logic, and yet they still innovate incredibly on the consumer front. GarageBand 09 is one of the best apps I've ever worked with. It's a sheer delight to use.
On top of this, Apple has the undisputed best design team on the planet. The stuff they do is breakthrough. The unibody enclosure on the new computers. Most recently, the battery life on the 17". The iPhone. The iPod. iTunes' music store, then iTunes' video store, and now the App Store. They are conceptually ahead of every other company, and technologically superior, and they have the best-designed products.
Beyond products: there are the Apple stores, some of which are dazzling feats of architecture. The Genius bars, which really, really do work. The way they treat employees - Apple is ranked extremely high among retail employee satisfaction, and it shows when you're a customer. I've been helped an hour after the store's official closing, and that's not a unique case. My mother's friend went and made a tourist stop to the Apple store in New York City. It was just an event for her. She came out utterly awed and in love with Apple products: she was an instant fan. It's miraculous how well everything looks and runs.
It's more than just face value. The people working at Apple are obsessive. I read an article just a few months ago about how they increased the thickness of headphones just enough to prevent possible tangles. They're not a headphone company. But they put effort into that small thing just to stand out ahead of the pack.
Microsoft doesn't have that.
And this is about advertising. Apple's ads are thoroughly brilliant and have been for nearly a decade. The iPod ads. The original iPhone ads, showing how powerful the phone was. The iMac ad with the spinning computer. The Macbook Air coming out of the envelope. They advertise successfully because they focus on how beautiful their products are. You need something beautiful to advertise beautiful, but they pull it off. Even now. The App Store ads? The ones showing how you can download a guidebook of any language and have your phone speak the phrases for you? Or the very newest ones, which show four or five applications each? I have an iPod touch and those ads still excite me, because they remind me of just how powerful this thing is.
Microsoft can't do this. They have some things that are technologically interesting, but they don't make good products, not like that. You mention Microsoft Office. I've used it - I wrote a book in it - and I've used Pages from iWork, and frankly, I'd pick TextEdit over Word for most things. Pages is already a league beyond Word. It makes documents look beautiful. It makes writing extremely pleasurable. It's got such a powerful, simple engine that it's a delight to use. Same with Keynote versus Powerpoint, or Mail.app versus Outlook. Apple creates products that make you joyous. Microsoft makes products that have features you need, but they leave it at that. There's no passion.
And CP+B gets that. They're Apple fanatics. So with Seinfeld, their goal was to distract. To make you think of the Microsoft brand name, because if the name's there and the ad is warm, you'll like Microsoft more. Same with "I'm a PC." It's feel-good. That's all they can do. Because Microsoft is making deficient products, products that might be okay until you compare them to the Apple equivalents, you can't take Apple on head-on. They're a beast. They lead the music industry, they're the fastest-growing phone industry, they make computers that turn people into raving fanatics consistently. So what you do is try to make something sensationalist, something that makes people ignore Apple.
Only it doesn't work. Apple's too savvy, too cutting-edge, and too popular to be ignored that easily. So this campaign backfired, and Apple ended up gaining more than Microsoft did. It was an impressive bluff, but that's all it was - a bluff. It failed.
First, more hardware choice. There are a lot of hot PCs out there (netbooks, lots of what Sony puts out, panasonic toughbooks, UMPCs, tablets).
Second, software choice. Just start shooting off titles that have no (or no good) mac equivalent.
Of course, I'm a mac/unix guy, so I couldn't say I miss that stuff myself :-)
Plus Bill Gates making fun of himself... you wouldn't see many CEOs doing that (even Steve Jobs!).
The article doesn't add much value to what we already know about those ads.
Just to see Bill Gates reading from "Code Complete" to that kid was worth the whole thing....
FWIW, the ad was actually shown twice, the first time was a month before the super bowl at midnight somewhere in Idaho, specifically so it could be submitted to award ceremonies for the year.
(sorry pg, there's only so much constructive criticism I can give before I call it like it is :-))
But seriously, the people who seek identity from their computers are younger audiences not older ones. That ad, by using a 90s era sitcom character, was aimed at people who are older. For the people who Microsoft needs to gain some momentum, it probably ended up making them look ridiculous. Microsoft is still in the game because of their market power and first-mover status back in the dawn of personal computers, but it will be very hard for them to dig themselves out of the hole they are in with money alone.