What were they thinking? How does this sound? MS is sponsoring a special showing of LoA so why don't we make a commercial?
Further the desert scene is one of the most famous in film history and everyone in the audience will understand it.
See that wasn't too difficult now was it? I could probably make it even easier if it was.
What I find appalling is the intentional ignoring of the context of the ad. It is not like people here were at home watching their Teletubbies when the commercial appeared.
No it was shown to a group of people who made a special effort to go see a film that is almost 50 years old and is 5th on the AFI's top 100 films of all time
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.
if you recall it was the nature of the multi-tasking that was in question. It was demonstrated time and again on other devices that unfettered and uncontrolled multitasking drained the battery very quickly - a consumer no-no. Apple decided to forego multitasking until they could provide a solution that had a much smaller impact on the power system. Same thing with C/C/P - it is not as straight forward in the touch interface as it is with pointing devices. Better to wait and get it "right" than to push out a half-assed solution to patch.
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LewysBlackmore
If (as an analogy) I were to be locked-in to a robust environment that had all the resources I desired to do pretty much whatever I wanted, then yes - of course. If you are locking me into an environment that has scarce resources that are marginally developed in all but a few cases - of course not. It is the resource issue that comes to the fore in this case not some generalist BS about whether something is locked or not. It's not MS hating - it's realistic expectations. The MS app store is even smaller than the Android Marketplace, and that is supposed to jazz the average consumer how exactly? We've seen, and some of us here have actually played with the WP7 beta, and follow the development of the ecosystem closely.
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.
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 need 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
So what if it hits the internet without context - that is true for almost everything.
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.
Quote:
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.
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."
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.
Again, so what if the context is lost.
Quote:
Originally Posted by addabox
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.
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by addabox
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."
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.
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...
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.
Quote:
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
Comments
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
What were they thinking? How does this sound? MS is sponsoring a special showing of LoA so why don't we make a commercial?
Further the desert scene is one of the most famous in film history and everyone in the audience will understand it.
See that wasn't too difficult now was it? I could probably make it even easier if it was.
What I find appalling is the intentional ignoring of the context of the ad. It is not like people here were at home watching their Teletubbies when the commercial appeared.
No it was shown to a group of people who made a special effort to go see a film that is almost 50 years old and is 5th on the AFI's top 100 films of all time
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.
if you recall it was the nature of the multi-tasking that was in question. It was demonstrated time and again on other devices that unfettered and uncontrolled multitasking drained the battery very quickly - a consumer no-no. Apple decided to forego multitasking until they could provide a solution that had a much smaller impact on the power system. Same thing with C/C/P - it is not as straight forward in the touch interface as it is with pointing devices. Better to wait and get it "right" than to push out a half-assed solution to patch.
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.
If (as an analogy) I were to be locked-in to a robust environment that had all the resources I desired to do pretty much whatever I wanted, then yes - of course. If you are locking me into an environment that has scarce resources that are marginally developed in all but a few cases - of course not. It is the resource issue that comes to the fore in this case not some generalist BS about whether something is locked or not. It's not MS hating - it's realistic expectations. The MS app store is even smaller than the Android Marketplace, and that is supposed to jazz the average consumer how exactly? We've seen, and some of us here have actually played with the WP7 beta, and follow the development of the ecosystem closely.
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.
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 need 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.
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.
I foresee great fail in this new WP7 from Microfail
That may be true, but that has nothing to do with this ad.
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.
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 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.
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)
So what if it hits the internet without context - that is true for almost everything.
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.
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.
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."
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)
No, I am mean this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjewkn59yw0
The title is Gasim regained. Start around 4:30.
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'.
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.
Again, so what if the context 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.
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.
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."
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.
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...
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.
Again, so what if the context is lost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
Crack open a thesaurus. There are better descriptions available. How about hypnotic? Fascinating? Compelling? Intriguing? Enthralling? Absorbing?
Or magical. But only if you like using words that way.
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.