In my last post, I wrote about a billboard campaign that was clearly not designed by designers. Yet there's another campaign which demonstrates that you can throw a football stadium of designers and a whole lot of money at a project and still have no guarantee of success.
The advertiser in question? Microsoft.
Here's a poster I saw outside the Macarthur BART station yesterday:
This campaign really gets on my nerves. I mean, what's the message?
- Microsoft's customers are members of an extinct species?
- They're unevolved?
- They have lumpy green skin and boring
taste in clothing?
- If Microsoft customers were REALLY with-it, they'd buy every
annoying update to Office?
I'm not making this up. You may not be able to read the tagline (click the photo to see a larger version) but it says "Microsoft Office has evolved. Have you?"
Microsoft's previous campaign was the gag-inducing, "Your potential. Our passion," a line which always put unwelcome images in my mind of a sweaty Bill Gates in a compromising position with a keyboard. But they seem to have decided that insulting their customers was a better way to go.
I suppose the market will decide... and I'll keep using OpenOffice on my Mac and Office 2000 on my PC.
Must do something about that scaley green skin, though. Anyone out there who can recommend a good exfolient?
