8 Cringe-Inducing Microsoft Marketing Stunts

Launched in 1994, this campaign was Microsoft's first attempt to sculpt its image on a global scale, and it has had a lasting resonance over the years -- although mainly as fodder for ridiculing Microsoft. Over the years, jokesters have plugged into their own answers to this question, including ones like "definitely not to federal court to face antitrust charges."



Microsoft reportedly paid advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy $100 million to create, print and broadcast outdoor ads for the campaign. The goal was to reshape Microsoft's image as a company whose influence and capabilities extended not just to software, but to a multitude of other business and lifestyle areas. To Microsoft's credit, it's sending this message far more effectively today with the 'I'm a PC' campaign.

In 2001, Microsoft used Madonna's Grammy Award-winning hit 'Ray Of Light' in a television commercial to drum up excitement over the launch of Windows XP. The ad, part of Microsoft's $200 million campaign to promote XP, showed smiling people flying around towns and parks, and inside office buildings, all apparently without the use of hallucinogenics. The idea was to show how XP's new features and functionality could enable almost superhuman powers of communication, but Microsoft was hit with a mild backlash when people discovered that XP couldn't actually enable them to fly.





'Ray Of Light' would have been a much more appropriate song for Microsoft to use with Windows 7 marketing, given that Windows 7 represents exactly that for both Microsoft and channel partners who are still trying to figure out what to do with all those unused Windows Vista licenses.

Last September, Microsoft kicked off a $300 million brand-polishing campaign with a pair of television ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. The ads included a bewildering lack of Microsoft branding or messaging, and appeared to be a sort of mea culpa on Microsoft's part for not staying in close enough touch with the pulse of consumer desire. Ultimately, though, the Seinfeld-Gates ads just frustrated viewers and made them want to break things.



The first 90-second spot showed Seinfeld helping Gates pick out a pair of shoes at the local mall. The second, which was more than four minutes long, depicted Seinfeld and Gates visiting the home of a suburban family in a bid to connect with common folk. Speculation later arose that Microsoft may have been trying to make the most pointless, inane ads possible in order to get people's attention. Viewed through that lens, both ads were rousingly successful.

In April 2008, shortly after Microsoft released Vista service pack 1, an internal Microsoft video leaked that stunned the entire IT industry with its corniness. Microsoft insists the video was a joke not meant for public eyes, but the fact that company resources were expended on the video should be grounds for a shareholder revolt complete with pitchforks and torches.





The video is a faithful rendition of Bruce Springsteen's 'Dancing In The Dark,' even including The Boss dragging the Courteney Cox character on stage to dance at the end. The lyrics suggest that companies that avoided moving to Vista would be blown away by the performance improvements of SP1, and include the priceless line: "When they see the improvements in security / The desktop and mobility and productivity / They'll say 'Vista gotta get me some'". It's not really marketing, but the video is definitely memorable -- for all the wrong reasons.

HP and AMD deserve as much ridicule as Microsoft in any analysis of the 'Pimp My Infrastructure' contest idea hatched by the three companies last September. The absurdly funny contest took the premise of MTV's popular 'Pimp My Ride' show and applied it to an SMB that was laboring under the ignominy of outdated PCs and servers.



The video promoting the contest shows an IT administrator named Harold getting his outdated servers 'pimped' by a team of professionals. Like many actual Pimp My Ride contestants, Harold is nearly moved to tears when he glimpses his new infrastructure -- a combination of Microsoft's Windows Essentials Business Server 2008 and HP's BladeSystem c3000 solution, a.k.a. 'The Shortie'.

Microsoft really, really wants the public to know that Internet Explorer 8 has a whole bunch of new and exciting features, including privacy options that allow multiple users to keep their Web-surfing histories concealed. Microsoft got a bit carried away, though, in an advertisement that highlights this particular feature.



The video, which came out in June, shows a woman using her husband's laptop and finding out that he'd just been surfing some Web sites of ill repute. After several seconds of shocked whimpering, the woman vomits on the floor, only to have her husband walk in immediately after and slip and fall directly into it.



Although the ad was never televised, it prompted enough complaints to compel Microsoft to pull it from its Web site, although the video does live on thanks to the magic of YouTube.

Launched in June, Microsoft Australia's 'Ten Grand is Buried Here' contest invited folks to take part in an online treasure-hunting contest and was intended to illuminate the wondrous new features of Internet Explorer 8. According to reports, the contest Web page initially greeted visitors using browsers other than IE 8 with the message "get rid of it or get lost," and created the impression that users wouldn't be able to take part in the contest using any other browser.



Of course, this led to the customary firestorm of Microsoft-focused criticism, and the company later changed the messaging to "get lost in the hunt." However, in light of the fallout Microsoft has endured from previous IE-related decisions, one has to question the wisdom of this particular campaign.

Microsoft's goal here was to make the case that IE 8 is just as fast and secure as any browser on the market, including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. But the IE 8 'Get The Facts' campaign was slammed as a verbatim copy of Microsoft's Linux 'Get The Facts' campaign, and it also bore similarities to Microsoft's defense of Vista in the way Microsoft deflected criticisms of the product as merely the result of ill-founded industry hearsay.



"It's time to clear the air around what's being passed on to you, the real Web users," according to the campaign's Web site.



The campaign received its most vociferous criticism for Microsoft's claim that IE 8 "passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium's test cases than any other browser." When Microsoft released IE 8 in March, developers immediately ran it through The Web Standards Project's Acid 3 Test, and IE 8 scored just 20 out of a possible 100 points.