You Thought Vista Was Bad?You Thought Vista Was Bad?

Like a lot of folks, I saw the first Microsoft ad with Jerry Seinfeld during the NFL season opener. This is the ad campaign that is supposed to resurrect Vista's image with the public? Holy cow, this ad makes IBM's Ideating concept look like marketing genius.Let's get the obvious stupidities out of the way first. There's no mention of Vista, which seems curious since this was supposed to rehabilitate Vista's image. Bill Gates is by this point an accomplished straight man for several comedians, but he isn't even involved in the company management anymore. As for the "plot" of the ad, what was the whole churro, Conquistador, Shoe Circus concept supposed to be about?

I thought the ad would get back to some kind of message when Jerry Seinfeld said "Just wondering, are they ever going to come out with something that will make our computers..." Oh yeah, here it comes, watch Jerry ask for some incredible PC feature and be surprised when Bill says that Vista already does it. But then Jerry continues that question with, "...moist and chewy like cake, so we can eat 'em while we're working?"

I couldn't find who directed this commercial, but I did find two Seinfeld commercials that demonstrate opposite ends of the effectiveness spectrum. The first is Seinfeld and Superman; this was actually part of a series from 2004. You will notice that it takes five minutes to say that American Express has a 90-day product replacement warranty on anything you buy with the card. But at least it had a message, unlike the Microsoft ad.

Compare that to the 30-second Seinfeld in England ad that ran a decade ago. In that short period it manages to entertain and get its pro-AmEx message across as well. So perhaps the biggest problem that Microsoft has is that they gave the "creative" folks too much time to work in. If Microsoft's 90-second bridge-to-nowhere commercial had to fit into 30 seconds, at least it would have been a blessed 60 seconds shorter.

TechCrunch got hold of an internal e-mail from Microsoft VP Bill Veghte saying this first round of ads was "an icebreaker to reintroduce Microsoft to viewers in a consumer context." This doesn't seem like a very good reintroduction.

So we've finally found something that's much worse than Vista: Vista commercials. And don't tell me this commercial succeeded because we're talking about it; the real target audience, nontechnical consumers, couldn't have possibly gotten anything from it. If this campaign is to have any hope of a favorable comparison to the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" series, it had better get itself on track soon.