Your post & pitch is almost exactly the thing I was after for!
I couldn't have come up with a pitch like yours, which imo would be so much better for Microsoft than the current "carton of milk" -analogy.
25 karma · joined May 4, 2010
I couldn't have come up with a pitch like yours, which imo would be so much better for Microsoft than the current "carton of milk" -analogy.
no - I don't work in marketing, and you're probably right about the fact that I am not even near the target audience.
But does it really matter?
I believe you can relate to the fact that the more further you're from the target audience the more objectively you can slice & dice the advert. Of course, I might be too far away from the target audience so my views might be biased in that sense.
I don't pass judgement. I started writing in the basis that I wanted to share my own perception of the matter and hear what you guys have to say against it.
But what I do believe, is that they're asking the customer to think the analogy behind the idea of not drinking 9 year old milk and connecting that to the idea of not using a 9 yo browser (old = bad, new = good as you said). Wouldn't you agree that for that analogy to work with the message they're trying to convey, you need to make a connection of putting the IE Browser into the milk's place in that analogy?
I mean look at that page: half of your screen is filled with a carton of milk - the other half tells about why you wouldn't use a browser (IE 6) which also is 9 yo. So wouldn't you agree that somewhere in there lies the notion of IE 6 being as good as 9 yo milk?
Probably?
And remember that most people are bad at remembering numbers. Names, on the other hand, are something that most people do remember better.
Therefore, imho, I don't understand what the marketing department was thinking, as in my opinion, the advert connects your thoughts about 9yo milk to an internet browser (of which we already have created our own views) - and in the long run people will most probably only remember 9 yo milk & Internet Explorer (and bear in mind that this advert comes from microsoft).
Therefore, the question of what was the marketing department thinking rose into my mind. I believe that the point of viewing and "comparing" IE & a carton of milk screams for some serious rebranding for the product called "internet explorer" - because nerds can really relate to that message or what?
And in the end of the day, they are the people who power the revolutions of switching browsers.
tl;dr I don't believe that the advert works in advantage for Microsoft & IE
You're marketing a version of your product which is compared against a carton of milk. I tend to think that when you're marketing a browser you should regard them as valuable cars, as you wan't to build up some goodwill among your customer base.
If your customers regard your browser as a carton of milk which basically is just a carton of milk - a product that's fastly consumed - then what makes them to connect to your product (in this case, an internet browser)? Will it build goodwill?
What if mercedes benz announced that their old products are just tin cans - and that you probably wouldn't want to keep old tin cans laying around - what kind of a message would the company be conveying to the customer in view of their product?
If microsoft itself views the explorer product family as cartons of milk and also conveys a clear message of it through its own marketing - then, in my opinion, as brutal as it sounds, it's time to rebrand the product. Even when you're publishing a new version of the product, essentially, you'll just be publishing a prettier carton of milk.
What was the marketing department thinking?
Although, based on the comments on youtube I believe someone might've taken it seriously.
It was so obviously scripted by Barack's pr people to win the hearts of nerds.
That has an oxymoron feel into it, don't you think?
What would make them want to pay for it when they can already easily create a picture album in flickr (or any other free picture hosting website for that matter) and point their friends into it?
I mean that would be completely free for them. I still don't see the point why anyone in their right mind would want to pay 1$ for uploading a picture & creating a web page which has those mentioned pictures - Where's the value for the user compared to other sites ???
It's not the year 1998 anymore, you know...
You can't seriously be suggesting that I'd opt to choose your site instead of a local one, merely because there's just a crapload of crap from everywhere of the world which pretty much clutters the whole plainfield for every player in the market of crapmania.
Why would I upload a 1$ picture when there's no users to speak of? I mean, the site itself has no indication of how much people is using it. So if I'm a potential seller who wants to sell his crap, why would I opt a site that shows in no way how much users it has (if it's not public knowledge that the site has a lot of users).