Microsoft begins Windows Phone 7 media blitz with new teaser ad - Page 4

Why are you asuming this is the only commercial that MS will ever make for WP7?

I foresee great fail in this new WP7 from Microfail

And then the commercial will live on on the internet without context, provoking furrowed brows.

Producing an ad specifically for a single showing of a single film may be MS' idea of viral marketing and creating buzz, but MS is actually pretty famous for pursuing some pretty eccentric and largely feckless marketing ideas.

And before anyone deploys the tired "Hey, we're talking about it it must be working", tech discussion sites have almost literally nothing to do with the markets MS needs to be reaching to get the kind of mass success they must surely feel they need.

Personally, I find mysterioso teaser campaigns to be tiresome, and it sets you up for a letdown after you've been wandering around implying Everyone's Life Will Change on the Big Day. I much prefer Apple's penchant for building a device, keeping their cards close to their vest until that device is ready to ship, then running ads that emphasize what it can do and how it works.

Sorry to be blunt, but this is the typical "bait and switch" common here. I was not talking about Apple, or their reasons for not having multitasking, all of which are probably perfectly valid.

I was talking about the posters here - the vast majority who argued that multitasking was, at best, unnecessary, and at worst, a detriment to performance.

For these same posters to then argument that WP7 sucks because it does not have multitasking is hypocritical.



Where to start. First, your argue about your personal preferences , which are going to vary from person to person.

Second, since the MS App store is not even open yet, we have no idea how many apps will be available. On top of that, MS claims 300,000 downloads of the SDK. So, if only 10% submit apps, then the store opens with 30,000 apps.

Apps are like Mutually Assured Destruction, after a certain number, they are irrelevant from the consumers point of view. Most of the surveys I have seen indicate that across all platforms, most apps are not really used after a couple of weeks.

Beyond a set of core apps the rest is just fluff or niche items.

So what if it hits the internet without context - that is true for almost everything.

What is the hot thing in Advertising - why does iAds exist? The answer, targeted, focussed advertising to a specific population.

Are you going to say that Apple is wasting their time with iAds because it is targeted to a specific audience, and the ad may hit internet and people may go WTF? No you wont.

This is not a teaser campaign - this was a specific ad for a specific event.

People here seem to think this will be the ONLY commercial that MS will make.

That may be true, but that has nothing to do with this ad.

i find it to be entertaining and funny. why? because if one knows anything about LOA then one knows that the mirage scene is the one where the image that comes into focus is omar sharif and that as he gets into focus he shoots the man drinking from his well. so maybe ms is being very clever and saying they are going to put the smack down on companies drinking from 'their well'. outrageous yes, funny yes. over the heads of most Mac users? evidently...

I find it to entertaining and funny, because if one knows anything about LoA then one knows that the mirage scene is the one where Lawrence Lawrence retraces his steps into the Suns Anvil, finds the half-dead Gasim, rescues him, and returns into the oasis/camp with Gasim clinging to his saddle.

The scene has nothing to do with Omar Sherif and the well.

oh you mean this one?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMX0W...eature=related

the one that has absolutely no shimmering mirage getting more and more into focus?
FAIL!

try using google or even BING instead of your mouth (by way of keyboard)

Is there a point to that? Mine is is that your strenuous claims for obvious contextual appropriateness at a particular film screening fall apart once the ad gets widely disseminated online. So that for the eventual vast majority of viewings, the LOA connection is lost.


Um, that strikes me as a bizarre and specious analogy, unless you suspect MS is going to produce thousands of single shot, hyper narrow ads for various film screenings, dinner parties, club dates, etc.

iAds certainly wouldn't exist if the point were to create ads for a few hundred people, once. When we speak of "targeted, focused advertising" we generally don't mean "a few hundred people, once."

No, I am mean this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjewkn59yw0

The title is Gasim regained. Start around 4:30.

same sequence i sent in clip. nope, that ain't the 'famous mirage scene'.

Again, so what if the context is lost.


No, I expect MS to make lots of different ads, some that will appear in different contexts, and the ads will be appropriate for the context. So, I would expect an ad for WP7 appearing in a men's magazine would be different than the ad appearing in a woman's magazine.


True, but the point is, that if you take an ad targeted to one group of people (e.g., towards teenagers, with current cultural references) slap it on You Tube, the older set will go what the hell and won't understand it. That does not make the ad bad etc, just because it is taken out of context.

Any given person's familiarity with LOA is entirely beside the point, as I've been saying. Of course the people at the screening could see the connection. They will wind up comprising a tiny fraction of people who view the film.

Your elaborately parsed mapping of the ad's brief imagery to specific plot points in LOA may even be what MS had in mind, but if it is the ad is wildly overdetermined and qualifies more as an inside joke than any kind of advertising.

At any rate, to expect any more than a vanishingly slight number of people to work that all out from a shimmering phone in the desert, and then to apparently conclude that doing so is some kind of benchmark of cultural literacy or intelligence that "Mac users" can't handle suggests that your'e just being a dick for being a dick's sake.

I dunno, it kinda obviates your point about the ad being well contextualized at the screening? In other words, so what if everybody got it at the theater, they're massively in the minority.


Yes, well, all of that is being extremely casual about the differences in scale. A few hundred people in a theater do not equal a magazine buy or a demographic. Advertising to 10 people at a time does not equal advertising to a million people at a time, and going over the heads of people over 18 does not equal going over the heads of, for all practical purposes, everyone who is going to see your ad-- the folks in the theater representing the merest drop in the bucket.

no, just putting in my 2 cents regarding a famous movie and scene (i thought Mac users were supposed to be the 'cultured' ones?) and ms advert. sorry i didn't just up and call it pure sh*t because ms did it like a good many here have done. were they being dicks for 'being a dicks' sake?

Eh, it's kind of a cute ad, better than the Droid ads (Do we really want to become cyborgs?) but I hope they didn't spend much on it. Maybe ok as a teaser, but they'll need to come up with something more compelling for their full campaign, obviously. (I doubt that it was even that compelling for the targeted micro-audience, worth a chuckle, at most.)

i agree. was it spectacular? no. do i think people will say 'oh i so have to get rid of my iphone for this!" no. was it in any way as good as apple's ads? i don't think so. did anyone tell steve balmer that there was some relationship to the ad and them 'killing competition that is drinking from ms well" and then he proceeded to jump up and down while screeching like a monkey with glee? god i hope so and wish it were on youtube!

Yeah, I think we're arguing at cross purposes-- I can't speak for any given Mac person's grasp of film history, I just have a suspicion, given the realities of how these things disseminate, that the allusion will be largely lost for most people-- regardless of platform choice

At any rate, no doubt there will be more small scale ad buys, because MS is looking to build buzz for their big move into a modern mobile OS, and those will be followed by absolutely relentless TV and print buys. I don't think the possibly too clever by half teaser stuff is going to tell us much about the general campaign, since teasers serve a different purpose. I think the disastrous Palm campaign is pretty illustrative of the perils of using the vaguely evocative as the centerpiece of your main ad buys.

I'm kind of interested in what MS intends to do with their main campaign. If they go the Kin route, and insist that Windows Phone 7 is for screaming, sweating, leaping young people, I think that'll be a major misstep. If they go the "I'm Windows" route, that kind of tethers the new exciting thing to the old boring thing. And God help them if they go high concept ala the Seinfeld head-scratchers.

I'm expecting something between Zune-ish surreal and Apple fun time. Failing that, something kind of boring that shows the usual MS pod people enjoying the hell out moving panels around.

Actually, at this point, I have no idea what MS' idea about advertising is. They seem to have been careening around wildly with tone and focus, so I'm not sure they know either.

we all know ms will make a product that is annoying and a bad copy of someone else's successful product. apple's worst enemy is/can be Apple. i don't think apple ever lost out to ms so much as they screwed themselves years ago. what bothers me is that they may go down that same path again.

Now here's something that Newtron and I can totally agree on. Your list of alternatives is great!

I too dislike the use of "magical" to describe the gadgets we use in our daily lives.

And again we agree. I'm in my late 60s and I haven't seen the movie (I'm not a film buff). Therefore I'm not blasting the "WTF" aspect of the ad, knowing full well that it was targeted at a group of folks who would indeed understand (and perhaps appreciate) the connections between LoA and the WinFone.

I think it's pretty ignorant of posters who haven't seen the movie to pop off with "I don't understand"-type comments.

It's an advertisement for gosh sakes. It wasn't meant for many of us on the comments forum.

Well that is a minute I will never get back. The caption should be, "The Revolution came and trampled us over the last 3 tears, now we a finally ready to do something, but it will be rather pathetic and sad."

That's because most of them most assuredly are not. Terms like "maddening", "user-hostile", "slapped-together" and "a complete and utter waste of money" spring to mind.

However, given Apple's tight coupling of a highly responsive multitouch UI to very specific hardware, in order to sell the idea that you are directly manipulating your files as if they were real world objects, I'm not sure that "magical" is completely fatuous (it is, of course, at least mildly fatuous).

Apple isn't just throwing "magical" around to denote whatever random bit of consumer kit they happened to shovel out the door. They're talking about that particular experience, which after all is very new to the computing landscape. I dare say some not insignificant number of people experiencing the iPod for the first time might well find it "magical."

I can't imagine is was all that expensive and given that MS/WinPhone is partnering with Secret Cinema I would expect more themed film ads like that for each event.

And I'd think that more folks in the UK has seen LoA than in the US (percentage wise) so I dunno that we should apply US sensibilities (or the lack thereof) to the ad.

As far as the teen demographics go if they launch with some XBox ports on their app store with Live support that should do the male gamer demographic. This series of ads seem to be targeting cinema lovers which isn't a bad one to address for a multimedia smart phone.

That exemplifies their software as well. I recently had to work on a client's Server 2008. What a mess that thing is. Every setting is in a completely different part of the management console and each preference has a totally different visual layout. It is clear that different teams build the bits and parts with no unifying style.

That is how their ad campaigns usually turn out as well. All different approaches, different styles but void of any unifying brand identity. The most pathetic though is when they try to copy Apple. That always flops.

I think I would recommend that they target strictly enterprise and business users and forget the consumers. If the phone is any good it will migrate to the general public much like Blackberry did. BB started out as business only and eventually went mainstream. At least MS has some credibility in the business space.

So long as the commercials look really slick, the product must also be slick. I would be the last human on the planet to run windows on a phone ... so Microsoft ... you need to sell over 6 billion phones to get to me. Good luck.

Well that it's an ad shown at the screening of LoA in London is plastered over the YouTube version so it's still in context unless you can't or wont read what you're watching...


I would guess that 90%+ of the folks viewing this ad on you tube got to it via some tech site telling folks this was the WP7 ad shown before LoA...

Looks like Secret Cinema has done Blade Runner...with the winphone acting as replicant eye scanner...(around 2:30)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqNTz...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERdUe...eature=related

Okay...they're spending an asston of money on these Secret Cinema events and I'm jealous. That looked like fun.

here's a SciFi/Anime related WP7/Secret Cinema trailer. A bit lamer than the LoA trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzscT...eature=related

Looks like in 2008 Nokia was the sponsor...guess someone got outbid by MS in 2009.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hemhy...eature=related

Aliens 2009 - Nostromo powered by Windows Phone (00:59)...I guess now we really know why it exploded...not a self destruct command but a BSOD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3-5q...eature=related

Oh look! It's the Kin II!

Assuming $100M of similar derivative hype per month, should we assume it'll vanish forever five months after it appears?

damn! these do look like fun. at least i can thank ms for letting me know about the secret cinema (although i feel like a complete numbskull for not knowing about them sooner!)

Why??????? Its more MSFT crap.

Because it's the paid shills jumping in. A truly pathetic company.

Because consumers that like the iPhone are much smarter than those that would even consider this POS.

Heh. There's a lot of video games mentality in this forum. MS vs Android. MS vs. iPhone. MS vs...

I don't think MS is competing against anyone in particular. They want their product to be successful (and make them heaps of money in the process. They don't really care who loses market share as long as they get it.

Seen? Try "heard of" instead

True.

It will be replaced with Windows Phone 8...

Wow, you managed to put word "fail" twice in single sentence, but on of them is hidden in pseudo-name. Smart

Furrowed brows are not necessarily bad thing.

I recall well commercial with robot/android in low sprinter-start position, with text "Clio has arrived" appearing on the screen at the end of the commercial. There was no other explanation and I do recall asking myself WTF is that? Turned out to be the commercial for the first gen Renault Clio. That was probably 15 years ago if not more... and I still remember it. How many "Toyota - Ordinary People" from the past few years do I remember? Hardly any. Likewise other more informative/obvious car ads.

I think that adds like this one, even if people don't connect with it's movie inspiration, will generate some interest to actually look around.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. I haven't checked out a Windows 7 Phone personally, so I'm just reserving my judgement until I get my hands on one. It might work well for the corporate crowd, but Microsoft will have to compete with RIM in that department, not Google or Apple.

That being said, launching any smartphone in this day and age without a Copy & Paste function or multitasking seems more de-evolutionary than "revolutionary."

However, and as I've said, if you don't get the LOA reference you're left with "Arabic", which, given the political passions of the day, seems like a kind of risky choice.