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Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 Ads: Not Much To Offer, So Confuse ‘Em

July 2nd, 2009

After hearing someone vomited, I checked out some of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 ads. While the cheap PC ads do have a point, these IE 8 ads make the Seinfeld ones look really good. Which is bad.

My overall feeling while viewing these ads was confusion. They’re surreal, with bizarre, hard-to-remember acronyms and visual nonsense, none of which has anything to do with computers, let alone a web browser. In this one, the “expert” is holding a rubber band ball. Why? No reason whatsoever as far as I can tell.

Then we have the vomiting ad, which is so crass that all I’ll remember is the vomiting. So my brand association is: Microsoft = vomit. And Microsoft must know they screwed up, since the ad has been pulled.

I think these ads resort to nonsense because there are few, concrete, demonstrable reasons to use IE over Firefox or Safari. So these ads just present constantly moving confusion in the hopes they’ll work as brand awareness.

Meanwhile, this chart promoting IE 8 (hat tip to Steven Hodson) over at Microsoft’s own website sports similar nonsense. IE 8 is marked the winner in several questionable criteria (no doubt hand-picked by Microsoft themselves), and where other browsers are better, the reasons simply don’t matter. Particularly lame are the performance and web standards entries:

“Web Standards: Firefox and Chrome have more support for emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS3, but Internet Explorer 8 invested heavily in having world-class, consistent support for the entire CSS2.1 specification.”

“Performance: Knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.”

Meanwhile, IE8 fails the Acid 3 test, and on fails performance (especially JavaScript). So Microsoft says those don’t really matter. Uh-huh.

Kind of reminds me of the old “confuse a cat” skit from Monty Python, quite frankly…

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1 Comment

  1. Artful Dodger says:
    July 6, 2009 at 10:08 am

    Hello, many thanks for linking to my blog. Good post by the way. That puking vid is disgusting. Microsoft have also been advertising all over the London Underground ;)

    Reply

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