How not to spend $300 million

Are you following the Microsoft "marketing rehab" saga these days? The biggest company in IT is feeling blue over its sinking reputation (give Vista a big hand, everyone!), and over those recent sand-kicked-in-face encounters with competitors like Apple. In response, MS is undertaking a $300 million "makeover" to remind the world that it's still relevant, hip, and the software vendor of choice for a billion Earthlings.

Fair enough. The campaign price tag raises 300 million eyebrows, but MS is good for it – 300 mil is like a comic book and a Mountain Dew to them. So a pricey "marketing rehab" sounds fine. But here's what's keeping those millions of eyebrows at half-staff: the fruit of the campaign is... all over the place. It starts with a "taste test" trial... then samples some stop-and-go advertisement ideas... veers off into a risky swipe at a competitor's ads... It's a scattershot bricolage of unconnected messages, short-lived initiatives, and a few embarrasing fumbles. It's a little bit of everything (save a plan).

Let's take a look at the loose confederation of experiments that make up Microsoft Rehab 2008:

1. The Mojave experiment

The Mojave Experiment was Microsoft's demonstration that Vista is hampered by the unfair perception that it's a bad product. The trial purported to give people a real taste of Vista without a mouthful of pre-conceptions, by having them try and rate a mysterious "new OS" (Vista in disguise). As MS reports, participants initially gave Vista an average rating of 4.4 out of 10, but upon encountering "Mojave" (Surprise! It's Vista!) gave that OS an 8.5. Much better!

There was just one problem: the participants didn't really get to test Vista. Each only got to poke around for a few minutes under the watchful hand-holding of the test guide. There was no opportunity to experience Vista's infamous setup difficulties, missing drivers, hardware incompatibilities, activitation pains, and so on – the things that people actually hate about Vista when attempting to use it for real.

Not surprisingly, the opining public wasn't fooled, and added yet more nasty words to Vista's thick file. The most common charge was that Mojave comes across as Microsoft complaining, "Nothing's wrong with our product; it's the customer that's wrong". And that's not a message to inspire hugs.

So while the Mojave Experiment was an interesting idea, it's not going to go down in consumer taste-test fame along the storied likes of Folger's Crystals. Or even Palmolive dishwashing detergent. ("You're soaking in it", indeed.)

2. The Seinfeld experiment

Take well-known MS founder Bill Gates. Pair with mega-successful comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Result: MS becomes fresh, funny, and flava-ful.

That was the apparent plan, anyway. Two TV ads positioned the unlikely comedy pair as just a couple of normal-Joe buddies. The first installment has them shopping for shoes; the second, living in a home to "connect with real people". Neither hawks a specific product (though MS can't resist self-congratulatory plugs like "Bill, you've connected over a billion people").

Here are the ads:

While reactions varied widely, many watchers did find the ads likeable and amusing, if not big-guffaw funny. Gates is no comedian, but he put in a game performance. As for Seinfeld, he – well, did Seinfeld, which a decade of sitcom watchers (including me) found pretty hilarious.

Still, something seemed amiss. Not a single observer failed to note that Seinfeld's time atop comedy's peak ended with his show 10 years ago, making him an odd choice for a "young and in-touch" message; younger targets of the ads won't have much nostalgia for or even familiarity with Jerry. And while the world liked Jerry's show "about nothing", that seems a less popular theme for commercials; "It's not about anything!" was a repeated complaint among viewers. 

Generous pundits were willing to wait and see how the ads played out; they were clearly teasers for more focused messages to come later. With Seinfeld taking in a widely-reported $10 million for his work on the ads, people assumed there were many more installments in the pipeline. But the experiment ended abruptly in mid-September. Microsoft's PR firm Waggener Edstrom announced the cancellation – and in the true spirit of public relations, called the sudden halt all part of a master plan. Kind of. Said the firm, "People would have been happier if everyone loved the ads, but this was not unexpected."

An MS spokesman played the same spin: "All along we said we were having a teaser campaign. We're getting ready to start the second phase. This was the plan all along." Really? Bloggers smirked at that explanation after learning that there is indeed a third Gates and Seinfield ad completed, but not scheduled to air. (Surely that couldn't have been part of the plan!) The snickers kept on coming, with the observations that the ads' creators, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, had earlier been profiled by Apple Canada for their enthusiastic praise for Macs, while Seinfeld himself was earlier a star of Apple's Think Different campaign. 

So that was that; the Seinfeld experiment is done. (As far as we know.) A lot of observers are saying that the head-scratching ads and sudden cancellation did MS more harm than good. Looking at the second ad in which the buddies clash with a "real family", a Slashdot entry put a snarky spin on it all:

"Although the ad does not mention Microsoft's operating system directly, it does mirror the real world experience of the company's products — appearing where not wanted, hard to remove, causing administration headaches, and finally being forced out in hopes of getting one's living space back."

3. The Windows Guru experiment

Even tossing $10 million at a comedian leaves a lot left over in a $300 million purse. Here's the next item on the marketing rehab shopping list: a cadre of 155 "Windows Gurus" to haunt Circuit City and Best Buy stores in search of Vista buyers. The Gurus will answer questions, run workshops, and "innovate, educate, [and] inspire".