19th April 2007

Best and Worst Microsft Ads in the Same Week

posted in Marketing |

This week Microsoft has reached new highs and lows in their advertising. Earlier in the week Joe Wilcox posted a Microsoft developer ad with a picture of a young Bill Gates. This ad is great on so many levels- it personalizes Bill, it shows opportunity and inspiration, and it shows that Microsoft is a company with its roots deeply in a developer culture.

Inspired Ad featuring Bll Gates

Then just last night Kat pointed out the worst ad ever, even worse than the dinosaurs ad a few years ago where Microsoft basically called their customers stupid. I’m not sure if its a coincidence that both of these ads are for Office but if you go to www.msn.com the top of the creen is taken over by something that attempts to show you how wonderful the new Office 2007 UI is. The result is the most cluttered mess I’ve ever seen- I wonder if the folks putting this ad together ever bothered to try it out in a real browser with the real MSN UI? Initially it looks like its supposed to be part of the MSN UI since it blends in the with the color scheme, but you get this strange collision of the browser UI with its toolbars, the Office “strip” and the MSN set of cluttered links.

Worst Microsoft Ad Ever (for Office)

On one level the concept seems like it should be a good one (show off how their new UI is cool), but the execution is just a disaster.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 10:25 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 2 responses to “Best and Worst Microsft Ads in the Same Week”

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  1. 1 On April 19th, 2007, Michael said:

    Really? I’m think the first ad is just ok, nothing too cool or too wrong, but I thought the 2nd ad was pretty innovative and kind of a different approach to web marketing. I thought that it did garner my attention, yet at the same time, it wasn’t too annoying, or felt too in your face. And it does what it advertises, shows how Office can do live previews and make the experience a good one. I don’t know about you, but I would have said that’s a new high in advertising. I’m quite sure that if you looked at some of the other blogs talking about this, they really do like it.

  2. 2 On April 23rd, 2007, Alex said:

    I guess that does show that these sort of things are quite a matter of taste. The second ad (the Office one) was brought to my attention by a friend as “what the heck happened to my browser”. When the reaction to your ad by someone in your key target market (information worker who uses Office 2003 all day) is that something is broken, I
    think something is wrong. And to be clear I’ve heard this from more than one person.

    I should also add that I do like the concept of trying to show some key functionality of the product. Just in this case the execution feels very poor because the UI mixed in with the web-browser and the MSN UI doesn’t work right. MSN’s content is not your typical word-doc and doesn’t fit right with it. And back when we were starting out OWA for Exchange 2000 we spent months (er, years?) trying to get the meld of Outlook-like UI in a web-browser frame working right.

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