New Vista advertisement debuts and flops
As expected, the new Windows Vista commercial with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates debuted on Sept 4th as part of Microsoft’s $300 million advertising campaign to restore Vista’s public perception problem. A perception problem that has mushroomed into everybody and their brother pouring hate upon Vista without ever having used it and one that persists despite Vista users relatively positive experience with the OS. Will this new commercial do what “The Mojave Experiment” advertisements failed to do? Umm, No. Sorry Microsoft but you have to do better than two old guys talking about shoes. Seinfeld’s whole “show about nothing” comedic approach is just so “90’s” and doesn’t carry over well to a commercial about computers. Suffice it say, Gates & Seinfeld are no Hodgman & Long. Apple can rest easy.
Flopped according to whom?
Is there some pie in the sky ratings group that informed us of the flop this morning?
It only flopped because Linux-geek called mac-geek and they flamed it together..then recompiled their kernel while snickering about the word “poop”
Give me a break
@ Eric
I think that is the exact problem Microsoft faces. They are trying to market to two very different crowds. You have the tech people and the non-techies who have different expectations. If it was me, I would market to the techies as they are the ones telling their non-techie friends what to buy.
@Eric:
You and your wife obviously get it. If this ad _campaign_ were intended for geeks, it likely would not be airing on tv. This soft-sell first commercial got exactly the response from your wife that MS was looking for. She’s now familiar with the ad concept and the characters involved in a positive way and will likely take some interest in the second commercial. That defines the beginning of a successful campaign.
#1 Seinfeld fan right here!
Jerry is the best
Bill is stale though.
I found the ads quite funny. I look forward to watching the rest.
Uh…this commercial made no sense? I’ll admit that I liked the commercial because it was like a mini Seinfeld episode guest starring Bill Gates (!!!). It was great, in that respect. But I had a big problem with what the commercial was meant to sell. It’d make a lot more sense if this was meant to sell, like…SHOES. Or even the churro Jerry was holding in the beginning of the commercial, for heaven’s sakes. But there wasn’t much of anything there about Microsoft itself, or its OS. It was pretty much a waste of time, given what it was meant to sell to start with. x_x
Was this even an advertisement about Vista, or just a marketing campaign to get Microsoft’s name back into the public consciousness?
Those are two very different things, and I think that this commercial clearly falls into the latter category.
Just wait til the next spot showing Jerry and Bill standing in line for Apple Puree from the Soup Nazi.
i’m sorry, but that was way too long. sure, it’s funny and entertaining, but 27 seconds is a long time for someone to watch something where the product flashes for about ten seconds at the end. good super bowl commmercial, but something that will be lost during a commercial break, especially when there’s no clue that it’s a windows vista commercial. heck, it would have been windows xp that they were advertising.
300 million would be better spent releasing the next version of windows earlier. from a marketing perspective – they should just position vista like apple did with OSX 10.0/10.1 – a good introduction to what’s yet to come, fix everything in the interim, and build the experience from the next version.
Not impressed… at all. They def could have come up with something better than this.
How is it that out of ALL the people that reviewed and watched it before it was released found this to be entertaining? Not one single person spoke up and said, “Wait a minute guys.. this just isn’t funny… or good advertisement.”
First, jackasses!!!!!!!