How dumb can it get?: new MSN ad campaign

By Kip Kniskern on March 21, 2008 2:12 PM

11 comments

Thanks to Todd Bishop of the Seattle PI (Why are these ads for MSN, Not Windows Live?) for taking a picture of the billboard I drove by today:

It appeared this week in south Seattle, and I’ve been hearing some radio ads on local stations, too. Apparently this is part of a new campaign by The Wunderman Network, called No One Wants To Look Dumb, which as far as I can tell fails its own test, miserably. Aside from the “ad campaign from your parents generation” look and feel to the whole thing, there’s the videos. OK, bad videos from MSN, we know the drill. So I go to MSN Video to pull one and embed it, and sure enough there they are – except, no wait, “this feature has been disabled for this video”!!

OK so let’s get this straight – in an effort to not “look dumb”, MSN has disabled the ability to virally spread the campaign (as if that’s going to happen, yeah right). So by now, of course, two of the four videos are on YouTube anyway.

No One Wants to Look Dumb

This is just so sad.

Posted in News | Tags: Advertising, MSN

Comments

quikboy

It’s so funny how Microsoft usually has the most lamest advertising campaigns. For a company interested in doing ad services, they sure don’t make good ads themselves.

The billboard shows no reason why we should use MSN. Plus I think Sherlock did more of the detecting than Watson, so I don’t get the point of saying that.

And yeah, it was much worse before with MSN restricting their own produced videos. I don’t understand what’s the biggie with embedding videos.

And yep, the video sucks as well. Who worries about knowing impressive facts for their date? Plus both guys look like losers. And do you really find this info just from MSN content? Most of MSN is just reposted content from another major content source.

If you want to find info, they should be advertising Live Search to do it. Another failed advertising campaign from MS.
Mephiles

Why don’t they advertise Windows Live? It has much better and more useful things than MSN.
rb1385

What’s so wonderful about Windows Live?
Chris

Well I guess it comes down to what is MS trying to achieve – here is Microsoft trying to advertise its content portal as opposed it its internet services. The main content providers are traditional media companies + MSN and Yahoo, as opposed to the battleground of services that is Web 2.0, Facebook + Yahoo + Google.

The question is out of these two markets, where is Microsoft doing worst? I’d argue services, which leads us back to where is this $300m ad campaign they are doing for Windows, Windows Live and Windows Mobile?

Any yes, these MSN ads are probably some of the worst we’ve seen for a long time.
andyedmo

I’d point a finger at Wunderman, the flash promo is exceptionally poorly executed… http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyed/2349064850/
Khristopher

Microsoft being lame? NO! *gasp*
Alber1690

I actually disagree; these ads focus their attention on very specific, everyday events, which is always good. Because some of us tech enthusiasts sometimes forget how to think like an “average computer user,” every time a new video comes up, I show it to my “average” friends. This video accomplished its task well: establish MSN.com as a portal to invaluable information. From the five people I showed it to, with myself right next to them, they all said it was pretty entertaining. During the week, 3 out 5 used MSN.com for either the weather, movies information, or simply to waste time on MSN.com on a slow day. As we all know, Live Search market share has been dropping ever since it changed names, so when it had the MSN Search brand, and advertising existed with those cool search bar ads (one premiered on the Super Bowl), search market share was much higher for Microsoft. This is because in a world where people believe that Google is actually the source of all of their queries (like crediting Google.com for some research information as the source), Microsoft needs to establish MSN as a brand “with information.” There, people will naturally use Live Search because of the integration, and they’ll never even find out that they’re using Live Search, because quite frankly, the day that someone will be saying “Let me Live Search it” and visiting “search.live.com” is simply out farther than the end of time. So let’s give this campaign a chance.

The only thing I didn’t find a smart move was for MSN video to disable embedding of the video, but hey, that’s why there’s YouTube.
paulstorm

I’m with Alber1690 as well. Microsoft has undoubtedly ton of market research that shows MSN’s demographic strength is in people who use the portal to be informed, up to date, and learn a variety of different things. These most definitely should not be a Windows Live campaign…which is more about connecting *people* than information.
vipwoody

The link for the “Todd Bishop of the Seattle PI (Why are these ads for MSN, Not Windows Live?)” hyperlink gives this: http://http//blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/134717.asp?source=rss

tiny error there.
Kip Kniskern

Thanks vipwoody, fixed. I had a lot of trouble getting the YouTube video to embed correctly (Community Server does some strange things to html), and was so busy with that I missed out on checking the links.

The Todd Bishop post is an important part of the discussion, as he asks why, in a situation where there is already so much brand confusion around MSN and Windows Live, do the billboards seem to be advertising finding things (Sherlock, etc) via MSN. The last thing MS needs to do is add to the confusion.
quikboy

Well maybe MSN does have something to do with this. But at this moment, I don’t think MSN is even that good of a site. I think MSN is in a far worse state than WinLive.

You’d think the MSN team would have updated their website with better features, better layouts and designs, and something more worthy. But nope. It still a bore, with only minor updates. There’s some nicer new stuff, but not enough to draw people away from Yahoo!

Yahoo! is far better for content-based things than MSN. Sad, but true. At least WinLive has some services that are actually worth it to users.

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