Posted byHarry McCracken on October 22, 2009 at 1:30 am
Later today in New York City, Microsoft will be hosting its Windows 7 launch event. I won’t be there, but I have a good excuse: I decided to stay home in San Francisco and go to the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit to see Tim Berners-Lee speak. I hope everyone who makes the trek has a good time, but I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that nothing transpires that leaves me kicking myself for not attending. (Microsoft plans to stream the event live starting at 11am EDT, so those of us who aren’t there can check in on the festivities.)
In lieu of being at the 7 launch, I’ve been revisiting old clips relating to Windows launches past. Join me, won’t you? Continue Reading →
Posted byHarry McCracken on October 14, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Part of the upcoming extravaganza of Windows 7 marketing which will presumably soon be upon us involves a November 8th Fox TV special starring Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane. It’s sponsored by Microsoft and has Windows 7 references woven in. (I refuse to call it “commercial-free,” but it’ll have no traditional breaks for standard commercials.)
I’ll wait to judge the whole thing until I watch the show (or don’t watch it!) but there seems to be a basic cognitive dissonance at work when a supposedly take-no-prisoners, slay-all-sacred-cows kinda sensibility is applied to a paid advertising message. (There’s a reason why MAD magazine–from which all modern humor springs–refused to accept even traditional advertising back in the day.)
But if nothing else, the show will ensure that lots and lots of people are exposed to Windows 7…
Posted byHarry McCracken on September 29, 2009 at 3:07 pm
As TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid has reported, DoubleTwist–a media manager application that, among other things, serves as a bridge between iTunes and non-Apple devices–is promoting a new version that debuts on October 6th with an ad that looks…eerily familiar:
Yup, the ad is an animated remake of Apple’s legendary “1984” commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, which introduced the Mac–except this time the scary overlord (who seemed to represent IBM the first time around) bears a striking resemblance to Steve Jobs:
DoubleTwist isn’t saying what the new feature is, but in general, the company’s product is on the side of the angels–it lets people who don’t own Apple devices participate in the iTunes ecology in a way that makes way more sense than Palm’s USB spoofing. DoubleTwist founder Jon “DVD Jon” Lech Johansen is a kind of a genius, and I’m curious what the company has up its sleeve.
That said, I don’t think much of the ad. It doesn’t take much creativity to remake somebody else’s commercial, and this particular remake is less than artful. Then again, I also think that of Apple’s version. It may be universally regarded as one of the greatest TV ads of all time, but the Orwellian overtones were as hyperbolic in 1984 as they are in 2009. And what potential customer wants to watch a commercial that depicts him or her as a compliant zombie? (I’d like to see Apple open up iTunes myself, but I don’t feel like I’m part of an army of lobotomized drones when I use it–nor do I think that Steve Jobs is any more of a terrifying Big Brother than whoever was running IBM in 1984.)
On the other hand, DoubleTwist’s first anti-Apple prank–getting a huge ad seemingly displayed on the outside wall of one of Apple’s flagship stores–is one of the greatest practical jokes ever played by anyone on anyone. May whatever DoubleTwist releases next week live up to the imagination it showed with that bit of guerilla marketing…
If you showed an alien this ad, he (she? it?) would come to the conclusion that Yahoo is a place where nobody’s old, bald, fat, or ugly–and where nobody uses computers. Whatever problems Yahoo has, they don’t avoid a shortage of users; I think it’s less about encouraging folks to use the site and more about attempting to glamorize the Yahoo name and remind marketers that a heck of a lot of folks use Yahoo for all sorts of purposes everyday.
Fair enough, I guess-but the emphasis on personalization (“It’s You”) feels like it’s still catching up with the reality of today’s Internet, where there’s hardly anything that isn’t really customizable, and where stuff created by real people is a primary attraction almost everywhere. If you stripped out the explicit Yahoo references and told me this was an ad for Windows Live, I’d believe you.
Posted byDavid Spark on September 28, 2009 at 9:34 am
(This interview is part of David Spark’s (@dspark) series “Making Money from Podcasting” (read summary “9 Successful Techniques for Making Money from Podcasting”) where he interviews podcasters who are actually generating revenue from their podcasts. There are many techniques, and here’s one person’s tale of how he’s making money from podcasting.)
Got audience? We’ll get you sponsors. Or, get sponsors on your own and we’ll insert the ads.
Rob Walch is the VP of podcaster relations at Wizzard Media, the former host of Podcast 411, a podcast that interviews other podcasters (he interviewed me when I hosted Sprint’s podcast), and the host of an even more popular podcast, Today in iPhone.
Walch has a long history and knowledge in podcasting. When I came up with the idea for the “Making Money from Podcasting” series, Walch was the first person I called. I talked to him about all the different business models and asked for suggestions of people to interview.
If I ran Best Buy, I’d do my darndest to keep anyone with an agenda other than serving the customer out of the selling process. Pretty much by definition, that would prohibit companies from doing these sorts of comparisons of their own products with those of competitors. I mean, if Macs are so crummy, why does Best Buy sell them?
It reminds me of an experience I had at CompUSA years ago: I was eyeing a Canon inkjet printer when a salesguy strolled up and gravely warned me that Canon printers’ ink cartridges had an alarming tendency to dry up–unlike those in HP printers. I couldn’t figure out why a CompUSA rep would care whether I bought a Canon or HP product–until I realized that he was actually an HP employee who CompUSA had allowed to troll for customers in its aisles…
Posted byHarry McCracken on August 27, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Advertising Age is reporting that a Delaware company is suing Microsoft’s ad agency over ads for Bing that were integrated into the TV show The Philanthropist. I’m not a big prime-time watcher, so this is the first I’ve heard of this:
Commercials for Bing were filmed on-set using actors from the show, which made its debut this summer and stars James Purefoy and Neve Campbell. The Bing-themed ads appeared between the TV programming and regular commercial breaks.
Posted byHarry McCracken on August 12, 2009 at 2:41 am
Last week, I blogged about a post over at Windows IT Pro that posited that all browsers would include ad-blocking as a standard feature within five years, and that it would be turned on by default. My post inspired some interesting debate both on this site and off it. I also included a poll: A plurality of the people who took it thought ads should be blocked by default, and a majority said browsers should include ad blocking as a standard feature.
I still don’t see any scenario under which the companies behind today’s widely-used browsers start blocking ads automatically. Google is the biggest company in Web advertising, Microsoft is spending a fortune to take Google on in that field, Apple is a major consumer advertiser, Mozilla and Opera make millions of dollars a year from the searches performed on their browsers’ home pages. They all simply have too much to lose on an ad-free Web.
Of course, something unforeseen could always happen. Maybe all these browsers will lose favor to one or more from one or more companies not so profoundly invested in Web advertising. Let’s engage in a bit of Twilight Zonesque speculation about what might happen if ad-blocking did become the default state of the Web. (At least for most folks–in a world in which some people will still be using IE6 in 2014, we’re not going to get to 100% ad blockage no matter what happens.)
As the proprietor of a Web site that’s mostly supported by advertising, I can’t claim to be a dispassionate bystander here…but I hope that at least some of the scenarios I outline below (not all of which are mutually exclusive) make clear that I’m not trying to prove a particular point.
Later today in New York City, Microsoft will be hosting its Windows 7 launch event. I won’t be there, but I have a good excuse: I decided to stay home in San Francisco and go to the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit to see Tim Berners-Lee speak. I hope everyone who makes the trek has a good time, but I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that nothing transpires that leaves me kicking myself for not attending. (Microsoft plans to stream the event live starting at 11am EDT, so those of us who aren’t there can check in on the festivities.)
Last week, I