Gates and Seinfeld: Gone fishin'?

Into the great wide open.  (Image via YouTube.com)

Jerry and Bill, we hardly knew ye... and that was exactly the problem, apparently. On Wednesday Microsoft announced the end of its controversial new Windows ads featuring Seinfeld and Gates attempting to mingle with the normals, after the first two commercials were widely panned, including by me here and here. The company is insisting that the plan all along was to do only the spots already finished, as a "warm-up" for the rest of the campaign. Future commercials, the New York Times reports today, will feature an attempt to directly attack the popular, cheeky Apple ads that feature John Hodgman and Justin Long mocking the PC as stodgy and out of touch. (In fact one of these ads dominates the New York Times' home page today, a strategy I wrote about here.)

Gizmodo reports that there's one more Jerry and Bill ad in the can, but no decision has been made about when it will air. But is it really believable that Microsoft intended only three Seinfeld/Gates ads to air, after paying the retired comedian a reported $10 million for the campaign? Michael Arrington of TechCrunch says his Microsoft sources all confirmed strongly that the plan was to stop here all along. Still: That means they agreed to give Seinfeld 3.3 million bucks a pop for the ads, one of which is 1 1/2 minutes long, the other a little over three minutes. Maybe the unseen one is a half-hour-long masterpiece, but still, Microsoft needs to work on negotiating tactics. ... Couldn't they have gotten him to do each commercial for, say, a cool million?

The spokespeople are all spinning the announcement of the ads' ending as vaguely as they can, with statements about Seinfeld's continuing "involvement" with the campaign.

Microsoft says the spots, by the boundary-pushing Crispin Porter + Bogusky, did their job and got people talking about the giant company again. They say they don't mind that quite a bit of that talk was downright nasty (or as the New York Times delicately put it, there was a lot of talk, "not all of it positive"). That piece quotes a brand perception expert saying that Microsoft's image started out 25% positive and 13% negative, but by Tuesday was 28% positive and 8% negative. You have to walk before you can run, I guess.

The new ads, meanwhile, are reportedly going directly at the Mac ads, with a John Hodgman type saying, "Hello, I'm a PC, and I've been made into a stereotype."

The first one comes out tonight, so let's wait to see how that plays. We're promised appearances by Eva Longoria and Deepak Chopra in future spots. But I can't resist one early impression: After condescending to us regular people with the Seinfeld and Gates ads, now Microsoft is asking us to view them as victims of ... stereotyping?

-- Maria Russo

Comments

[mike turner]

yea, their about as stupid as you can get.... great 3 commerical deal, for Jerry.

[Lurch from Toronto]

Gone fishin'... or piscene around?