The Ad About Nothing
Microsoft
has a new ad! And
experts are divided
over whether the quirky,
banter-heavy, no-need-to-mention-a-product spot is 90 seconds of
pure Seinfeldian genius, or a sad demonstration of what you get when
you try to advertise something that has no selling points.
Well, when I say “divided:” Microsoft thinks it’s pretty neat, and everybody else seems underwhelmed. In the face of this howling gale of criticism, Microsoft has responded: That’s just what we wanted! The ad is just a “teaser,” they say, meant to “get the conversation going.”
The Associated Press picked up this idea, ending its article with:
Even if the reaction was mostly negative, Microsoft’s ad has clearly succeeded in getting people talking.
And it popped up in lots of other places, too:
“It was a very odd commercial but it has the effect that people are talking about it now… so didn’t they get their money’s worth?” wrote ‘Amanda.’
I wonder when we can kill the idea that even colossal marketing blunders are secretly brilliant, since they at least got people’s attention. Because it sounds like I’m being asked to believe Microsoft deliberately blew $300 million as a strategic move to get everybody talking about what a waste of money that was. That must have been some pitch meeting. “Here’s our idea: a series of pointless, meandering ad spots that don’t actually promote your product, but spark worldwide debate about what the hell you thought you were trying to accomplish. Everyone will be talking about it!”
Presumably this firm would go on to promote Presidential candidates by having them drown puppies on live TV. You can’t beat that kind of exposure.
Personally, I don’t mind this ad. It’s the introduction of a long campaign; they’re just warming up. I’m prepared to believe it will be effective and entertaining. But if it sucks, that won’t mean it’s genius in disguise. It’ll just mean it sucks.
20 commentsOrwell: Blogger
So are you following the
Orwell diary?
Me, I was in a state of near-sexual excitement
when I heard they were posting George Orwell’s 1938-1942 diaries online,
seventy years after he wrote them. But that’s a whole other story; back to
Orwell. Imagine! A peek at the intimate thoughts of one of the
20th Century’s literary giants: a man whose searing intelligence produced works of majestic
satire, whose vision seems to only grow more relevant.
What crackling intellectual thunderstorms, I wondered, raged inside this man’s head? In 1938, with a world war a mere twelve months away, what socio-political clouds did he see brewing? I signed up to the live feed right away. Orwell blogging: was there anything the man didn’t anticipate?
First entry, August 9: Orwell relates how he caught a snake. I wondered briefly whether this was a reference to the Munich Agreement—the snake could be Chamberlain or Hitler, maybe, even Daladier. But no. He was talking about an actual snake. Well, okay: I guess if I caught a snake, that would be exciting. I’m not sure I’d blog about it. But still. I could see, I suppose, that even one of the world’s great thinkers might, upon encountering a snake, temporarily cease pondering the human condition to remark, “Ooh, snake.”
Next entry, then:
August 10
Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon.
That’s the whole thing. All right, so maybe my expectations were a little high. He wasn’t writing essays. He was writing for himself. And the important thing wasn’t the prose; it was the train of thought.
August 26
Hot. Dense ground-mist early this morning. Many blackberries now ripe, very large & fairly sweet. Also fair number of dew-berries. Walnuts now nearly full sized. Plenty of English apples in the shops.
Lots of apples, really? Well, that’s… good, I guess. You need apples. The more the better. Especially in shops.
August 28
Night before last an hour’s rain. Yesterday hot & overcast. Today ditto, with a few drops of rain in the afternoon. The hop-picking due to start in about a week.
Hops-picking. You can’t begin looking forward to that too soon. Got to love the delicious anticipation of looming hops-picking.
August 29
Overcast & chilly. Heavy rain last night. Dahlias now in full bloom.
This was when I decided to claw out my eyes to relieve the boredom. At least then something would be happening.
They say you should never meet your idols, because you’ll only be disappointed. Maybe you shouldn’t read their diaries, either.
(Or their web sites, ha ha, yes, very clever.)
Making Sense of Babel
Atheism seems to be on the rise lately. I say this as someone who has examined no studies
nor historical data, but who reads a lot of web sites. I see more people more comfortable with declaring their atheism than ever before.
I think it’s at least partly because of the internet, which provides a
meeting-place for sharing and reinforcing ideologies:
that’s something new for atheists, whereas people of various faiths have always had churches, plus, in many places, pervasive support from their community.
And the internet is not only good at uniting geographically dispersed but like-minded people: it’s also disproportionately popular amongst people with technical and scientific backgrounds, who in turn are disproportionately atheist. So, on balance, the web seems to me to be a net negative for major religion.
Which got me thinking of the Tower of Babel*. According to the Bible, a great tower was built long ago in the city of Babylon; the builders of said tower were a little too pleased with themselves and their achievement, at least for God’s liking. There’s a whiff of the Titanic about this story: arrogance so great that it practically begs for comeuppance.
Which God delivers, of course. It didn’t take much to set God off in the Old Testament; he’d smite you for a backward look. But here, he reacts in a way that at first seems a little odd: no smiting, no plagues; he doesn’t even—stop me if I have this wrong—destroy the tower:
And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
God is not concerned about the tower itself, or even the arrogance of its builders. That makes sense to me: you can be arrogant in any language, just look at France. God’s issue is with the ease of global communications.
So, as a story about the internet’s role in the decline of organized religion, the Tower of Babel makes perfect sense. I think that’s nifty.
(* Note: Religion is one of those touchy subjects you can’t write about without people looking for hidden agendas. Which is a shame, because religions are crammed full of stories that are interesting and meaningful regardless of how true you consider them to be. In the interests of full disclosure, I personally don’t believe the Bible to be a non-fiction work, but I hope that doesn’t bother you too much, and we can still be friends.)
House of Cuteness & Horror
A lot of parenting is like this: your gorgeous almost-three-year old daughter hops toward you, shouting, “Look, Daddy! Big jumps!” and you think: I hope she doesn’t trip and impale herself on that tree branch.
I don’t think I’m especially paranoid, but when I’m playing with Fin, I get flashes of her horrifically injuring herself about every ten minutes. When she actually does hurt herself, I’m mostly just relieved, because it’s so much better than it was in my head.
It’s a little weird to have your life filled with interlocking moments of joy and abject terror. They don’t mention that in the parenting books.
The other way parenting is like a horror show is how you periodically stumble past dolls arranged as crime scenes. Maybe it’s just me, but when I see something like this, I can’t help but think multi-vehicle pile-up:
And this strikes me not so much as “laundry day for Miffy” as “Hostel 3”:
And I’m sorry, I know Baby Puss got wet in the bath and needed to be dried, but there is no way to look at this and not see a baby on a hook:
But then you see this and forget all about it.
By the way, sorry for that long break between blogs. What the hell was I doing? I don’t even know.
My Age of Reason
I’m not a superstitious person. But I do believe your brain can
come to associate particular objects with particular feelings, and
this can affect you in ways you don’t consciously notice. So today as
I prepared my morning coffee, I thought:
Did I have a good writing day yesterday? Because I used my
Richmond Football Club cup: they won on the weekend and thus I was
feeling good about them. It was a logical choice. But today: would there
be a carry-over effect, or would the cup have absorbed too many
new vibes from the day before, and if so, were they good vibes or bad?
At this point I realized that I was standing frozen in the kitchen with half a teaspoon of sugar hovering above the cup. I’m glad no-one saw this, because it might have been difficult to explain how I’m not a superstitious person.
Scraping the Barrel
I decided to stop doing those blog posts where I pontificate about
how the world should be. Because reading those back, they even annoy me.
And the ones that annoy me the most are when I start yapping about
politics. I mean, please, like the world needs another shrill, ignorant
opinion on that.
Well, maybe just one more. Don’t you think it’s strange how often people vote for somebody they don’t like? Elections should be simple, shouldn’t they? We vote for whoever we want to win, and the popular choice prevails. But in practice, you often have an incentive to vote “tactically.” For example, if you’re electing the US Democratic nominee, there’s no point voting for your favorite candidate if he or she has no chance of defeating the Republican nominee in the General Election. You should only vote for someone who can ultimately win. So now your vote has to not simply express your own preference, but be modified by what you believe everybody else prefers, too.
Anywhere there’s plurality voting, you can’t safely vote for your favorite candidate unless you’re confident enough other people will too. Otherwise, you’re smarter to vote for your least-hated candidate with a practical chance of victory. (Or vote swap.)
Now, in my experience, any time someone expresses an opinion they don’t personally have, but think others do, it’s a terrible opinion. For example, I’ve seen it produce some pretty ugly book covers. And I’ll ignore it in any reader feedback I get on my story drafts. People who try to guess what other people want end up settling on the dullest, most conservative, and uninspiring choice available, even if none of them personally prefer it.*
I get that there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system. Some are more warped than others, but, okay, it’s surprisingly difficult to create a fair, practical voting system. Still. How disturbing is it that on top of every other form of corruption inherent in the political process, it can be completely reasonable for you to walk into a ballot room and vote for someone other than who you want to win?
(* That’s one of the reasons Hillary got so close to Barack. There, I said it.)