September 5th, 2008
Seinfeld becomes McCain
You can see the first Seinfeld ad for Microsoft here. It aired last night.
This is going to sound political, but it looked to me a lot like John McCain’s speech from later in the same evening.
That is, it was selling a myth.
In this case, the myth was of hero-geek Bill Gates. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Seinfeld did the same act on Superman for American Express. It’s the Marine basic training idea — tear them down to build them up.
The problem is that, as I’ve said here before, Elvis has left the building. Turning Bill Gates into Colonel Sanders is not going to beat open source, or even Apple for that matter.
Future ads, I expect, will show real Windows employees showing capabilities already built into their products, and some of what they’re working on in the lab.
Humanizing that is Jerry’s real challenge.
But since this may seem off-topic, let me conclude with a good open source question. If you were making a commercial for open source, who would it star? What would it say?
And the ad above (for Education Connection) doesn’t count. The challenge in advertising is always to come up with something new, something fresh, not just riff on what some more creative outfit has already done.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
| 09/05/08
