From Long Zheng’s I Started Something blog comes news of more ‘To the cloud’ television advertisements from Microsoft. The good news? They’re better than the ones imported from the US. The bad news? They still don’t make much sense. View the complete set below … but check any rationality at the door. Seriously … is this all Microsoft Australia can come up with?
The first one is pretty cringe-worthy, and the others seem totally confused about what “the cloud” actually is… I mean, editing photos is “the cloud”?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Microsoft ad that was actually any good.
That’s precisely the problem … “the cloud” is such a nebulous concept, which the consumer knows nothing about, and they never explain it.
People have been uploading photos to Flickr for a decade now. Why is web photo storage suddenly “in the cloud”??
Nebulous? Put your thesaurus away… ;)
As for why web photo storage is suddenly “the cloud”…it’s because whether their product is or isn’t cloud, they need to sound like they have a cloud presence.
Well truly MS does have one of the biggest cloud presences out there … but I don’t think they’re explaining it well in these ads.
As for nebulous … this is just the way I speak — I don’t own a thesaurus!!!! ;)
I think the problem is that their cloud solutions are mostly targeted at the enterprise, whereas these ads are targeted at consumers… it probably wouldn’t be so bad – though still cringe-worthy – if they didn’t make references to “the cloud” (after all, they’d just be advertising features of Windows & Windows Live).
I think you’ve nailed it there Dean.
1. Watch TV
2. Edit a photo
3. login to your home computer
None of those demos even use *the cloud* …
1. Windows 7 can record TV
2. Swap heads from different photos
3. Logging in to the home computer is done over the internet, not via a cloud. You’d only need to login to your computer if your “stuff” wasn’t in the cloud.
Ballmer’s probably happy though … it’s got a pretty girl in it …
But to watch the pretty girl you also have to watch the fat, bogan and geek guys …
I thought the bogan, bird-lover and Steve Ballmer Jr were the eye-candy for the girls. Gosh, who do you think this ad is targeted to? Certainly not average men or any of the gazillion tech-able women I know. If these male stereotypes were women there’d be an outpour of opprobium (right-click Michael, not that hard!).
But ultimately, yes, the ad is targeted at people who know nothing, leading to more people talking about the cloud at dinner parties when they really mean “the internet”. Not helpful.
How does Microsoft get their ad strategies consistently wrong? all the time?
Just an interesting note as someone in Marketing.. so in the first ad the girl is repulsed by these men at a speed dating night.. to the point that she seems to fall in love with an inanimate object instead.. yet in the following videos she is friends with not just one, but all of them?
The photobomb ad would actually be a good ad for a Windows product or as a feature for Windows 7, but as an ad for ‘the cloud’, it’s just… bizarre
From my fleeting interactions with Microsoft (Australia) – they really have NFI what is going on. They fly off to mothership rendezvous over in the US and arrive back in Botany Bay spouting Steve Balmer.
They’ve probably got 5 years behind Optus before actually realising the significant inbreeding.
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