Microsoft makes a great ad (seriously) | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft makes a great ad (seriously)

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13 pointsnjoglekar10 comments

I disagree. I enjoyed the nostalgia, but it did not make me long to use IE again. I ended up blogging about it. Below is the text from my blog, but the version on my website has links to the Draper Carousel speech if you haven't seen it: http://www.bradlanders.com/2013/01/24/hes-no-don-draper/

========

Anyone who has seen Don Draper’s iconic Carousel speech knows that nostalgia is a terribly effective agent for emptying consumers’ pockets. Apparently, a reader at Daring Fireball saw a correlation between Don’s work and a recent advertisement for Internet Explorer.

Take a moment to watch both the Carousel speech and the Internet Explorer ad before you move ahead. I’ll wait.

I don’t doubt that the agency responsible for the advertisement had this in mind when they scripted this piece. Unfortunately, the ad falls flat for me.

I grew up in the 90s. I saw a lot of things I remember fondly when I watched the ad; if not with a chuckle at the absurdity of the 90s aesthetic. I did feel connected with the images, but why didn’t I feel connected to the product?

Don Draper tells us we should be nostalgic, but not because we have a strong sentimental attachment to film slides. We feel what we do because of what the Carousel delivers. We insert our slides, dim the lights, and we are taken back to “a place where we know we are loved”.

Sob.

Unfortunately, yeterday’s Internet is gone. Internet Explorer cannot bring it back. Therefore, the product fails to deliver on the promise of the ad. That, I think, is the disconnect, and it’s the reason the ad falls flat for me.

You are not necessarily disagreeing. The ad can still be good regardless of how you feel about the product.

Boy, I'm sure disagreeable :) An ad can be enjoyable regardless of how you feel about the product, but it cannot be a good advertisement.

Yeah you're right. Poor choice of words on my part

For me, it doesn't work because all the ad is saying is, "Hey, wait for me! I'm better now! I'm just as good as those other guys!"

It doesn't hilight anything that IE does better than the other browsers. Instead, it's saying, "I'm a relic of the past, when I was the only thing available for lots of people. Remember that? Weren't those good times? We should go back to those times."

And, part of the problem with crapping on previous versions of your own product is that it sort of raises the question, will we be doing the same thing again 10 years from now? Will Microsoft still be trying to win people back by joking about how awful IE 10 was, how it didn't bring any major advancements, how it just caught up to where the other browsers were?

And and, let's not forget those remarkably stupid ads for IE run the last time 'round, where Microsoft decided that its best strategy for convincing people to switch back to IE was because it was a bunch of nerds that were pushing the other products and all the nerds were wrong. And nerdy. How's that for a little bit of nostalgia?

you can spray paint gold on a turd but its still, at best, a gold turd.

One of my favorite commercials ever is this one for Zune: http://youtu.be/IvDFbmb9DwE

It's not particularly great from any kind of branding sense or at selling the product.. but it's just fucking awesome anyways.

I enjoyed watching this ad, as it targets people from my generation (I was born in 1988).

could not agree more (born in 86)

Friends don't let friends use internet explorer. microsoft didn't like that and made internet explorer ads depicting us tech-savvy people as weirdos and nutjobs for recommending better browsers to our not-so-technical peers.

This so-called "great ad" is not going to wipe those insults clean.

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