Microsoft's ad agency Traffik/@radical.media produced this trailer for a godawful thriller based on Office 2010, a kind of 24 meets Enemy of the State thing. As a short comic film, it's a real success — I laughed aloud at least twice — but I'm not sure about its value as an advertisement. The humor is in-jokey, aimed at people who already know pretty much everything they need to know about Microsoft and its products and who tend to have their minds made up already (I haven't used Office since switching to the excellent OpenOffice.org years ago, and haven't missed it once; most of the Office users I know upgrade when they get a new version gratis with a new PC). So I suppose that this thing is meant to alert avid Office users to the existence of Office 2010, an hypothesis that is further borne out by the absence of any product info in the ad.
Still, if someone produced a video this funny for the next Ubuntu release, and managed to work in a couple of actual compelling sales messages aimed at proprietary OS users, I'd applaud.
- More Griping About Advertising: Bing Edition – Boing Boing
- Funny commercial for Microsoft's Songsmith – Boing Boing
- Super-sexy Windows XP ad resurrected by Nerve – Boing Boing
- Seinfeld and celebrity computer endorsements – Boing Boing
- iMac and PC frolic peacefully in new MSFT ad campaign – Boing Boing
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
