My interest here is the sheer amount of conversation this move has created.  I’m not sure if Crispin Porter + Bogusky is that brilliant, but they did claim from the beginning they were trying to get people to talk about windows and the campaign.  That has most certainly been achieved.  The two million video views on youtube, as noted in my prior post, is pretty strong evidence.

What I remain puzzled by is such moves have created a negative buzz.  The old rule of PR was: “I don’t care what they say, just make sure they spell the name right” but I can’t believe it applies in this case.  Also if as rumored they are going straight after the much beloved Mac/PC ads, they are certain to encounter an even bigger storm of negativity.  

However, the person that really needs to be convinced is not the online elitist, but an “average” consumer who doesn’t write blogs or get as involved in advertising and marketing as some others.  Is the bewilderment over the first couple of ads real for them, or did they just enjoy watching Seinfeld again?  Did people start to change their opinion of Microsoft after seeing some commercials that were nearly completely unrelated to actual products?  Will they even attribute those few vignettes to Microsoft at all?  My guess is most people somewhat enjoyed the commercials and shifted their opinion every so slightly positively for Microsoft.  It’s nudging a battle ship, but still an ever so slight move in the right direction.  

There’s still a big risk to this approach, and according to most the effort has been very expensive.  Microsoft is attacking a huge strategic problem of a bad corporate image in a very unusual way, but with an impressive and patient approach.

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.