Darwin Rolls His Eyes
Last week there were dinosaurs prowling the station as part of a godawful advertising promotion for Microsoft. What the hell? Do they still do this kind of dressing up box marketing, illustrated eloquently on the Simpsons with Barney Gumble handing out pamphlets in a nappy?
Apparently so. A bunch of paunchy men in suits and a plastic monster head, unable to speak and dying a little inside every time a passing schoolchild kicks them in the shins. Ye gods. It was like Mr Benn had been twisted inside out and fucked over by the shopkeeper’s malevolent twin brother from a bad dimension. For the most part they stood there with arms outstretched and being ignored by commuters who, it must be pointed out, would wander through a field of pink elephants without batting an eyelid if it were on the route to work. But these dinosaurs had a point to make and a handful of leaflets with which to convince us. We are being told that if we use software that came out more than ten minutes ago we are all going to die in a massive meteor attack, or whatever.
Well, balls to them. I refuse to be leafletted by a bloody metaphor. Their point is lost in a blizzard of red tape and cheap companies...the full Office package is used by, well, offices. The expense is astronomical; your Everyman walking through the station is not going to hand over a bundle of notes for such a bag of bad plastic, and if by a stroke of fortune they attracted the attention of an IT buyer...well, Brer Geek would already know the score on the software front and will have already been slapped down by the man in charge of the budget anyway.
Their campaign is flawed in general. This morning I saw that they are advertising on the tube. This is done with a story told through pictures and speech bubbles containing text roughly half the size of the small print in the neighbouring insurance advert. The adverts highlight a manner of working in the modern office that is now outdated...fucking up replying to one’s email, having to wait for a response email...all that kind of stuff. This is small beer and will sell no “product”. A few puffed-up rights management features do not highlight the supposed gulf of understand between your lumbering dinosaur and your jacked-in techno-sorcerer (or whatever bollocks the smug technophile writers are calling the seven or eight people in the world these days who bother keeping up with computing).
The campaign is based on the concept of progress. They forget that this is exactly the same message implicit in every advert ever...you need this new thing because it’s new. We are wise to this message and discern between products based on more than its age. At least we should do, and if we do not we deserve to have our wallets picked by these arseholes.
Microsoft is not sure which image they wish to promote. Here they want to project an image of being thoroughly modern, but do not notice that everyone feels that the company are themselves lumbering...too big, too slow to change and frankly too able to frighten the shit out of anyone who tries to escape their clutches. There is much bad publicity in the files and they hope that most of it flew past us all unnoticed. They are wrong because if they wish to monopolise our hard drives then they can only ever be the Necessary Evil at which we have been lashing out for years.
And they often wish to be seen as achingly hip...a company of goatee-bearded Silicon Valley posse of informal friends who just happen to be collaborating on Something Frightfully Cool. But Apple promote this cynical image far better, partially because of Steve Jobs’ embarrassing posturing and partially because they realise that many people are stupid enough to think that buying something pretty and shiny makes them more Tuned In, Stylish and Discerning than the general public. Hmm...which goes against our earlier point about the wisdom of consumers. Perhaps these campaigns are not flawed; they are, in fact, successfully turning our weaknesses against us. A result of the fashionable concept of status anxiety.
Hmm...these are strange waters of pop psychology and I think I should swim for the shore. I don’t know. This may be bitterness; I am still wrestling with Windows 95 at work and every time I see somebody with anything newer I can’t help but turning into an ugly Cockney washerwoman and sneering “Oooh, ‘ark at Mr Fancypants in his flash new motor.”
What a thought. Time to shake the weird images from my head and find something to eat.
Apparently so. A bunch of paunchy men in suits and a plastic monster head, unable to speak and dying a little inside every time a passing schoolchild kicks them in the shins. Ye gods. It was like Mr Benn had been twisted inside out and fucked over by the shopkeeper’s malevolent twin brother from a bad dimension. For the most part they stood there with arms outstretched and being ignored by commuters who, it must be pointed out, would wander through a field of pink elephants without batting an eyelid if it were on the route to work. But these dinosaurs had a point to make and a handful of leaflets with which to convince us. We are being told that if we use software that came out more than ten minutes ago we are all going to die in a massive meteor attack, or whatever.
Well, balls to them. I refuse to be leafletted by a bloody metaphor. Their point is lost in a blizzard of red tape and cheap companies...the full Office package is used by, well, offices. The expense is astronomical; your Everyman walking through the station is not going to hand over a bundle of notes for such a bag of bad plastic, and if by a stroke of fortune they attracted the attention of an IT buyer...well, Brer Geek would already know the score on the software front and will have already been slapped down by the man in charge of the budget anyway.
Their campaign is flawed in general. This morning I saw that they are advertising on the tube. This is done with a story told through pictures and speech bubbles containing text roughly half the size of the small print in the neighbouring insurance advert. The adverts highlight a manner of working in the modern office that is now outdated...fucking up replying to one’s email, having to wait for a response email...all that kind of stuff. This is small beer and will sell no “product”. A few puffed-up rights management features do not highlight the supposed gulf of understand between your lumbering dinosaur and your jacked-in techno-sorcerer (or whatever bollocks the smug technophile writers are calling the seven or eight people in the world these days who bother keeping up with computing).
The campaign is based on the concept of progress. They forget that this is exactly the same message implicit in every advert ever...you need this new thing because it’s new. We are wise to this message and discern between products based on more than its age. At least we should do, and if we do not we deserve to have our wallets picked by these arseholes.
Microsoft is not sure which image they wish to promote. Here they want to project an image of being thoroughly modern, but do not notice that everyone feels that the company are themselves lumbering...too big, too slow to change and frankly too able to frighten the shit out of anyone who tries to escape their clutches. There is much bad publicity in the files and they hope that most of it flew past us all unnoticed. They are wrong because if they wish to monopolise our hard drives then they can only ever be the Necessary Evil at which we have been lashing out for years.
And they often wish to be seen as achingly hip...a company of goatee-bearded Silicon Valley posse of informal friends who just happen to be collaborating on Something Frightfully Cool. But Apple promote this cynical image far better, partially because of Steve Jobs’ embarrassing posturing and partially because they realise that many people are stupid enough to think that buying something pretty and shiny makes them more Tuned In, Stylish and Discerning than the general public. Hmm...which goes against our earlier point about the wisdom of consumers. Perhaps these campaigns are not flawed; they are, in fact, successfully turning our weaknesses against us. A result of the fashionable concept of status anxiety.
Hmm...these are strange waters of pop psychology and I think I should swim for the shore. I don’t know. This may be bitterness; I am still wrestling with Windows 95 at work and every time I see somebody with anything newer I can’t help but turning into an ugly Cockney washerwoman and sneering “Oooh, ‘ark at Mr Fancypants in his flash new motor.”
What a thought. Time to shake the weird images from my head and find something to eat.
posted by Jamie at 5:27 PM
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