August 21st, 2008 // 52 Comments
Filed: Tech
The Borg is hiring Jerry Seinfeld (shown at right, using Vista for first time) in a sad attempt to counter Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads and win over young customers. That’s what the Journal is reporting today, citing “sources” close to the company. Well, it’s another brilliant move. Because Seinfeld is so hip — if by hip you mean “hip surgery.” Sure, the 50-something guys who run Microsoft think Seinfeld is waaaaay cool, and they’re all totally psyched to get to meet him and whatever. But think, people. Kids who are 18 today weren’t born when the Seinfeld show first aired in 1989. And they were only eight when the show went off the air. Geddit? They never watched it. They have no idea who Seinfeld is — except maybe they know him as that assclown in the bee costume in some flop movie that they didn’t see. Borg, come on. Seinfeld? Really? David Brenner wasn’t available? Or Jackie Mason? Don Rickles?
O Borg, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Laugh, I guess. But we won’t be laughing with you, if you know what I mean.
Two funny things about this morning’s story. One, it cites anonymous sources, who clearly were people inside Microsoft and/or Waggener Edstrom. But then the Journal goes out of its way to say that an official spokesperson at the Borg declined to comment. So prissy! Clearly this was a teed up story, for several reasons. One, do you really think anyone in the world, including reporters at the Journal, actually care enough about the Borg’s advertising plans to go chasing down sources for leaks? Second, there’s way too much info in the story. In other words, Borgbots wanted the story out and figured a leak to the Journal would generate more buzz than a simple press release.
Anyway, it’s classic Borg. We’re in trouble? Hire someone famous! Spend a shitload of money! This is Ballmer in full-blown Detroit mode (remember he grew up in the Motor City and his dad worked at Ford) trying to make the latest clunker seem cool by paying Dean Martin to drive one.
What the Borg doesn’t realize is that no matter how good an advertisement might be, it only resonates if there’s a grain of truth. Which is why the “I’m a Mac” ads worked. Also, no matter how great an ad might be, it can’t make people buy a bad product. It can’t make a bad product good. It’s advertising, not magic. (Note to Borg — maybe you should hire David Blaine? Or Criss Angel?)
Point is, Alpo could hire Jerry Seinfeld, but it couldn’t convince the world that it was selling caviar. But, um, good luck with that ad campaign, Microsoft. And keep working overtime on that Windows 7 product. Seriously.
Isn’t there some irony in the fact that in every episode of Seinfeld, there is a Mac sitting on the desk in the corner of his apartment?
“…The newspaper claims to know insiders who say the company has paid Jerry Seinfeld $10 million to appear alongside Bill Gates in Microsoft’s widely publicized “edgy” TV ad campaign and will allegedly stress the concept of “Windows not Walls,” removing barriers to communication with the operating system.” – electronista
Barf.
…yeah, didn’t he even have the 20th anniversary Mac at one point?
Welcome back, RDL. Keep posting pls. Kthx.
An ad about nothing.
“Hey Bill, what’s the deal with Windows Vista?”
Oh god.
So Mr. Bill is the nerdy dork, and Seinfeld is the cool dude?! Hmm, typecasting and stereotyping methinks. And that will help how?
I dunno, my niece is only 21 and she’s a huge Seinfeld fan, she even bought all the DVDs.
Maybe they should also hire Michael Richards to tell Apple users what he REALLY thinks of them.
“Also, no matter how great an ad might be, it can’t make people buy a bad product. It can’t make a bad product good.”
Unless it is a political ad.
I’m always surprised at how sharp and savy people think they are, how they believe they can see right through the bullshit… but then still complain that enough money for ads can “buy” an election.
I heard they wanted Jeff Goldblum but he was already taken.
Bill Gates would make a convincing George Costanza.
When IBM PC sales started to go flat, IBM hired the cast from “M*A*S*H,” fresh from overstaying their welcome on the prime time schedule, to do commercials. The campaign did the trick: IBM never lost its firm grip on the PC market.
“And keep working overtime on that Windows 7 product. Seriously.”
2000 developers working overtime… sad.
My son is 20 and he likes Seinfeld. Neither of us went to the bee movie and the weird plagiarizing deal with the cookbook might be a bit off-putting. But being funny is not limited by being old.
We also use and like Vista. Apple has fun products, and they don’t preclude MS products. They go together, like having Vista and OS whatever both installed on a mbp.
There’s an alternative perspective on this. Imagine that Microsoft actually gets that it’s not cool and they’ve hired a comedian past his prime to poke fun at themselves.
I realize this type of insight is not characteristic of the advertising MSFT has done in the past, but it’s possible that they get it.
The silver lining in those apple ads is that everyone actually likes the PC character and is annoyed by the smug hipster.
I much prefer this explanation of the Seinfeld hiring as it would make things more interesting to see some real competition for Apple in the ad arena.
Apple used Jerry Seinfeld in one of their famous “Think Different” ad’s.
Hey dan, you should have FSJ guest blog now and then. That would be fun, and you wouldn’t have to think about reopening his old blog (lets face it, it’s dead, and it was time). I am enjoying the new format though.
I tried to stay away from this blog, exploring other opportunities, but it did not work. RDL is back.
Best celebrity computer-related ads *ever* were those featuring John Cleese in Compaq’s commercials from the Eighties. You can look them up on you tube. They seriously rock.
Food for thought: Microsoft can afford to do anything, to create best product on the market, to have a best marketing campaign… and they pick Seinfeld. He is not even on-air anymore. And not very funny to begin with. If they hired Chris Rock, that would be another story. I’d buy Vista just for Chris Rock extras on it. And the octagon-joke, of course.
@Elaine
Aww, that’s really cute, Martin Luther King approach to operating systems (by the way Macs now run something call OS X, the current version of which is OS X.5 Leopard), living intermingled in harmony.
The trouble with that is that MS is a highly monopolistic enterprise and continuing with the race relations analogy, they behave more like segregation era white supremacists than civil rights activists in trying to block both Mac and Linux. I wasted a lot of time yesterday trying to edit my professional website on my employer’s server. It’s not at all Safari friendly. It even resisted Firefox 3 first time, but gave in the second time. I didn’t have those problems using FF on a PC for whatever reason. In between the first and second attempts with FF3, I was trying to use ie4osx (an Internet Explorer emulator for the Mac OS), which was compatible with my admin site, but run very slowly and slowed down my MacBook. Not to be recommended.
My little story illustrates the general problem. Those kind of compatibility problems are not an accident, they arise because MS does its best to make sure website software does not make life easy for non Windows users, and dropped Internet Explorer for Mac when they realised Apple had the temerity to develop its own browser. Real Jim Crow attitude to them uppity Mac users, say Sir when you’re talking to an MS coder boy.
It would be terrible if Apple became a similar monopoly because inevitably they would be tempted to behave the same way. The prospects are very remote right now, and it is important that some kind of level playing field should be produced through some decline in the MS monopoly. That’s why it would be a very good thing if the Vista ads are not such a success, and if Vista in general continues to struggle to accepted as a necessary upgrade for XP users.
@butchie
You’ve got that right. Mac in the ads is so annoying, he needs a smack the smug idiot. This whole thing of Macs being for people who’ve passed a cool test grates my cheese. I’m sure Jobs would fail the cool test, even though he must have approved those ads. Intense worksaholic dogmatic control freak, not really in line with the Mac image in the ad is it?
They’d get better results if they hired Gene Simmons.
I can’t wait to see the add comparing a windows mobile smart phone actually getting 3G and Edge reception and the Mac D-list celeb using his iPhone to keep his term paper from blowing away.
I heard they were trying to get Kramer. They were so close to getting a deal done when some lowly tech informed them of Kramer’s racial tirade over a year ago.
Two big problems with Seinfeld as a pitchman for Vista:
He’s already hawked HP laptops and has appeared in an Apple ad (shown, not speaking); the second being who apart from the Simple Masses would take a technology recommendation from a celebrity!?
I wouldn’t take farming advice from a skydiver. They’re completely unrelated fields, and the only technology savvy Seinfeld has shown is that he’s willing to smile for just about every product that comes his way.
Hey Dan – how’s that 3G iPhone working for you? All I read about is crappy 3G performance, dropped calls, bugs, and plastic cases that crack. Give us an update, please.
Speaking of David Blaine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYxu_MQSTTY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTqsV3q7rRU&feature=user
and i thought the mac guy was smug
To avoid conflict of interest, I am sure Seinfeld will show Vista running inside of a virtual machine under OS X.
))))
Since when are celebrities and pitchmen responsible for OS choices? I keep hearing that OSes “don’t matter anymore” because we are all walking on clouds (ask IBM) and downloading stuff to our mobile persmunicators.
So, what happened? Why do we still have to boot stuff? Isn’t it booted *once* to run the cloud thing?
Seriously.
Actually Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld are old friends. Years ago Bill hired Jerry to entertain guests at a party he was having at his newly remodeled house on the east shore of Lake Washington. Bill hired Jay Leno, too, when they released Windows 98.
Seinfeld is to “hip” what RDL is to FSJ.
Well, if they can get the “Your body is not an amusement park” line into the ad, it would be cool.
I slept through “Bee Movie” at the second run theater’s 50 cent Tuesday showing. The dollar dogs were good.
NUmber of points:
1.)Jerry Seinfeld owns a Mac Pro, several iPods, an iTouch, an iPhone and has Steve Jobs on his speed dial.
2.)A few months ago at the airport, he was using his wife’s Microsoft phone, how did I know? It was causing him hassles and frustrations and he cussed “Windows!” in the exact same tone of voice his “Jerry” character would say “Newman!”. I would give anything to have recorded that and sell as a ringtone.
3.)Isn’t Jerry Seinfeld a billionaire several times over? What the hell is ten million dollars, pocket change?
4.)This is as believable as an Alan Alda computer ad. This is a trial balloon to see how public and market would greet the idea of Seinfeld pushing Vista or any Microsoft product (conceivably he could shill Office for the Mac, which is the best stuff they actually make that doesn’t suck – too much.
I’m so sick of the Apple guy. Smug, abnoxious, arrogant, and… stupid. He doesn’t think so but he is.
The Windows guy is busy doing work. The Apple clown is in a coffee shop bitching about the “worlds problems”. Guess what? Nobody gives a shit what he thinks. SF isn’t the epicenter of world thought – or even a town down the street.
Seinfeld was funny – and is funny. I hope the ads are good.
… what? Jenna “Dharma & Greg” Elfman wasn’t available? as long as we’re talking ’90s comic icons …
i mean … that might get me to consider running vista … for like 5 seconds …
ok…i am new but love the reference of borg to the
bill’s collective…
ding-dang funny…
i must read on.
Or, to put it in mathematical terms:
Microsoft = PATHETIC.
q.e.d.
Sam
@ Sam Barrera
Do you mean “pathetic” or “PATH=%PATH%\etic”?
I can’t help but think of OS X when I think of the Vista launch. Our office had a 9:1 Mac to Windows ratio. We all excitedly upgraded all the Macs to OS X and even bought a few more Macs with the preinstall. And guess what happened? Everything went nuts. Macs crashed. Macs couldn’t connect to the network. Macs couldn’t connect to the internet. CD burners stopped working. All the original imacs we had went dark screen on us. I can’t tell you the work I had to do to fix those. And then there were the printer driver issues at the top of the peripheral driver issues. Don’t even get me started on broken software all ready installed on some of these macs. Updates galore! And we had to wait for so many of them while Adobe, and Quark and Microsoft hammered away at the issues. AHHHHH!
Okay, it was a rough beginning. Perhaps having smaller market share kept the actual media noise to a minimum. I don’t know. As you know, some of us Mac Heads are really quite vocal. Not just to say what we like, but what we don’t like as well. The big difference seemed to me to be that OS X wasn’t just OS X. It was OS X “Fill In Your Favorite Carnivorous Big Cat”. It was a work in progress. Many things were happening. G4 to G5 processors. Then to Intel. The freakin’ iPod. Yeah. They kept executing even when things were going bad. I can’t really feel too sorry for Vista because as long as they keep executing and coming out with cool products even in the face of seriously media hyped adversity, they will still be our favorite 90+ percent monopolizing bully they’ve been forever and a day. Or maybe it’ll be 80+ percent one day. Big Whoop. What a problem.
FSJ – I do miss you!
I’ll endorse something. ANYthing. I need a gig.
… and with stellar ZUNE sales, this is a no brainer.
Yeah, a operating system about nothing?!
The saddest part is that MSFT neglected to focus on new talent.
The digital revolution has put the power of video in the hands of the masses. Just point your browser to any video hosting service to find the work of young, hip, talent any of whom would relate to the marketplace better than Seinfeld.
I personally like these guys http://wildfeed.com/node/599 and think they would do a great piece. Or run a contest. Better yet, find 50 aspiring videographers or producers with good reels. Give THEM $50,000 each and MSFT would end up with better material than a rehash of old Seinfeld material.
Patronizing up-and-coming artists? Now that’s hip.
thanks you a lot
tnk
thanks …
very nice
great news
ajans kafks thanks