The folks who brought us Windows Vista and Bob the Paper Clip are coming up with some good advertising all of a sudden.
In a spot promoting a photo retouching service, mom is frustrated because she can’t get all her family members to look charming at the same time for a photo, so she says “to the cloud” and accesses an online link where she can mix and match faces from different photos. This is the first execution of a “cloud computing” message I’ve ever seen that works… most marketers get obsessed over explaining the technology and stumble on their copy, as in my example from the DMA recently.
On, you thought I was going to talk about the “Really?” campaign for the new Windows Phone? Well, here’s my problem with that. I first saw the full version of this during the 2nd inning of the World Series last night (GO GIANTS) and thought it was damn funny: people so obsessed with their phones that they are banging into each other, ignoring strippers and in one case picking up the phone after it’s been dropped in a urinal, causing the guy at the next stall to say “Really?” Then (without really showing the phone, because it hasn’t been released) Microsoft closes with the tag line, “it’s time for a phone to save us from our phones.”
The new spot has well over a million hits on YouTube since it went up on October 10, and a viral campaign has been launched inviting viewers to share their own “head in phone” moments. Hipsters get it. But I think this is going to go completely over the heads of post-ironic consumers of mass media. They are going to look at the obsession over phones, see Microsoft as the sponsor, then conclude “I want a phone that is so cool I can’t put it down like the people in the commercial.”
Though come to think of it, that might sell a lot of phones. Really.