December 2009 Archives

I’ve never used this blog to criticise or slander other people’s creativity. The fat content in Pret sandwiches, yes, but never the ideas that people put out there. Anyone brave enough to follow your creative star, I salute you. That sentiment is really what this blog’s about.

But then I saw the chip ad. And I think perhaps Microsoft is confident and comfortable in its own skin enough to take a tad of criticism.

I don’t know where to start, but let’s start with this ginormous widescreen illuminated poster in Edgware Road. Lord knows how wide it is or what size? 192 sheet? Good old 96 sheet was the biggest I ever dressed!

And let’s rewind still further to the strat-errrr-geee.

The campaign is to launch  Windows 7, the Microserfs latest attempt at being nowhere near as good as Mac when it comes to operating systems. It comes after the 3 year debacle that was Windows Vista, the clunky, complex and deeply faulted system that so many Windows users simply ignored, sticking to their quaint old XP.

(Yes I use a Windows VAIO as well as my home and office Macs, so I have a foot in the Gates camp and the right to an opinion.)

So what is the strategy that the £200k ++ planners have come up with? Simply that YOU created Windows 7. ‘I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea.’

I mean hello, how obvious is this? Everyone knows that software is developed using customer feedback. Isn’t that what Beta testing is? Aren’t we living (thank you T Blair) in a country shaped by focus groups?

The campaign is almost staggeringly patronising. I haven’t memorised the TV scripts, but one has a slightly Sloaney girl in the back of a taxi, having a Eureka Big A-ha moment realising that ‘I wanted Windows simpler, so they made it that way’, or words to that effect.

For once I’m lost for words – it’s a real insult to their customers’ intelligence.

Most of the print executions are pretty harmless, featuring models out of that stock of Central Casting ‘real people’ types that somehow don’t have the ring of authenticity at all.

At least they don’t have the funky girl of mixed ethnic background with the explosive mane of frizzy hair who seems to appear in every ad from M&S through to Dove. I’ve actually never see anyone look like that in normal life, but I guess in adland that’s an accepted take on ethnicity. Why can’t we see Christine Ohuruogo-alikes in our ads or even lads cut along the lines of Didier Drogba. (Man, he’s on fire.)

But I digress. I thought the campaign was just patronising and bland until I saw the fellow staring out onto the Edgware Road munching deep fried potatoes.

Call me old fashioned, but I quite like people with manners, particularly when it comes to eating. I know there was a period at the end of the nineties where agencies – led by the flavour of that day, HHCL – tried to get as many revolting images of gluttony in their ads as possible. Even across the year I remember the Pot Noodles being slobbered by various dysfunctionals. I confess it was quite funny at the time, and carried the shock of the new or rather new-on-TV. But do we need to go back there? Can’t Beautiful be the new Ugly?

And they’ve also fallen into the trap of casting the agency. Doesn’t he look like a planner in a Soho agency? Or maybe Noho? He looks very Saatchi and Scratchy. Long sleeve T, calculated stubble, and that look of concentrated arsiness that only an adman can give. (And I should know.) He’s slumped in the local, forcing a chip into his gob.

Now really Mike Rosoft, do we really want to look at this guy on a 70 foot long poster? Does he make you feel happy, inspired, challenged, educated? Nope. Personally I’d just like to set my retriever on him or send him into Brogans on Fulham Road on Match Day with an Arsenal shirt on, but there you go.

It’s just a really horrible image. Not artful, not funny, not stimulating. But he does look like the people who created the ad. Probably.

When I was in Big Agencies, back in the day, I had a general rule of thumb that the ads I was proud of would be the one I could one day stick on the wall in my study in the retirement home, and feel that I’d at least had a go. It didn’t have to be a beautiful ad – Nike was rude, Canon was weird, BA was cheeky, Emirates was thoughtful. But it had to be an ad, an image, a communication that would fit the looks-good-in-your-dotage test.

I mean how could you really be proud of this ad?

The model’s Mr Surly. The photography’s like it was done on a Nokia n73. As client or creative director, I wouldn’t accept an ad like that in a million years. The words aren’t special. The strategy’s generic, at best. But enough.

Rant over.

Anyway I’m off to lie on the sofa, turn on the web cam, and eat some McCains, yeah!