The second installment debuted on microsoft, and was quickly ported over to youtube (by microsoft themselves).  This video is over four minutes long and reveals a bit more about the reason behind the campaign.  Windows wants to connect with real people.  To do so they employed two extraordinary wealthy individuals and “embedded” them into a normal family.  Again, the feature has very little about computers.  However, this one is pretty funny, despite being a bit confusing.

There are a number of very interesting things here.  The second commercial (more accuratly a webisode) tells you exactly what the first was trying to accomplish.  It’s so above board about it, that you can’t help but respect that Microsoft realizes they have a very serious image problem.

The second interesting point is the amount of buzz these items have generated.  Each of the videos has generated around 1M views on youtube.  That’s no sneezing panda, but pretty sold for a video that’s been up for only a few weeks and requires an attention span longer than the typical 14 year old in need or ritalin (or average blogger for that matter).  Lots of people may hate it, but they are taking the time to post, comment and otherwise communicate about it.  It is sparking an honest debate.  That’s quite impressive given that a vast majority of Microsoft postings in the past tended to be harshly critical.

At the bottom line, I’m not sure if the commercial will be all that effective or not.  It’s quite the undertaking to take a brand as well known as Microsoft and change they way people view it.  In the end it might end up be an ad campaign about nothing.   However, at the very least they are taking on a huge problem in a very impressive manner using methods that only they could.

Smaller brands can learn a lot from this situation.  The biggest lesson is to never let your brand get this far out of control.  They were the big bad monopolist for a very long time and tended to ignore consumers along the way.  It’s what got Microsoft in the pickle between apple and needing to do a campaign like this.  The second lesson is that respecting your consumer’s intelligence can go a long way toward getting your message spread.  It’s my opinion that the reason this ad is generating this level of communicaiton is how frank and honest it is about the situation they are trying to address.