Your mission this week is to watch
this video:
Did you pick the surprise ending?
You probably did, firstly because there are only a handful of companies in the
world that are presumptuous enough to attempt to link an entire generation with
their product (Coca-Cola and Microsoft among them) and secondly because the
product name is right there in the video title.
The first time I saw the ad I was
at an advantage because I had no idea what it was for. In fact I was quite
enjoying the video until the last seconds when the infamous ‘e’ was revealed
and I frantically tried clean my eyeballs with sandpaper. Ads are
frequently turning to the surprise brending (brand + ending = brending) and
it’s an especially useful technique when you want to get the consumer on board
before they realise what a horrible thing it is you’re trying to sell.
Column Five, the advertising agency
responsible for the ad, have uploaded on their blog an interesting dissection
of their creative process. It’s interesting not only because it gives you an
insight into the mechanics of designing a successful ad campaign, but also
because it provides priceless examples of advertising jargon such as:
To
ensure the video was both newsworthy and shareworthy, our creative team worked
closely with our strategic communications team in developing the concept with
Internet Explorer.
I love this sort of thing. It is my
dream to one day to be a member of a ‘strategic communications team’ whose job
it is to develop concepts. In order to showcase my skills to any prospective
employers, I’ll demonstrate that I understand advertising by
translating the above sentence into English:
We
paid some people to make Internet Explorer appear less shit.
If you want to hire me you can
leave a comment at the bottom of the blog. My demands are that I work from home
and get thirty weeks of paid holiday per year.
Make no mistake, selling the latest
version of Internet Explorer in 2013 is a tough gig. Despite the fact that IE
still holds a significant market share—mostly due to its widespread use in
the corporate world where office computers are preloaded with the software and
the user doesn’t get a choice—Explorer is definitely uncool. It has suffered
from speed and security issues and has been severely hampered by sleeker and
more user-friendly browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Chrome. It is—as Microsoft have gone to a lot of
trouble to point out—an outdated product.
Whether or not the new Internet Explorer 10
actually is an improved product is somewhat beside the point of the campaign. Column
Five realised that even if Microsoft had managed to develop a product that was
much closer to the level of its competitors, years of brand damage couldn’t be
undone by a hard sell along the lines of ‘Internet Explorer 10 is NEW and
BETTER and you should try it!’ And so they turned to the tried and true
advertising technique of blurring the line between product and consumer
emotion. As Greg Foyster notes in his article on advertising, there came a point in the twentieth century when ad
companies had realised that instead of selling products based on their inherent
features, they could make a lot of money by ‘[linking] the consumption of
material goods with non-material needs,
which were endless.’ The result is an ad like ‘Child of the Nineties’, in which
Column Five and Microsoft aren’t selling you Internet Explorer—they’re
selling you nostalgia.
I’m guessing that probably close to eighty per
cent of the people reading this blog were born sometime between 1985 and 1995,
thereby making us ‘children of the nineties’. For most people, the memory of
childhood is pleasant—an innocent, carefree time unburdened by the
stress of adult life. I’m sure there
are at least a few objects in that ad that you distinctly remember
owning, using, wearing, or playing with. The hyper-realistic images presented
in the ad help transport you back to a seemingly less complicated, happier
time.
Column Five and Microsoft hope that
this nostalgia will get intertwined in your brain with Internet Explorer when
you watch the ad, and even if you don’t start using the browser, you hopefully
will have started to change your perception of it. As Column Five themselves
note, ‘that’s the impact we wanted more than anything: a reframing of IE’s
relationship with Gen Y.’ Since the 1980s modern advertising has been as much
about selling you a brand as it has
been about selling you a product. And in this case the brand is of primary
concern anyway, because you don’t actually have to buy IE10—it’s available
for free. It is brand perception—not price—that has a major influence
on your decision to use the Internet Explorer or not.
To an extent the ad has been
successful. It has struck a chord with many tech bloggers and online
commentators about Microsoft’s ‘creativity’, and has also given the company a
great starting point from which to launch IE into the 21st century.
But I do wonder whether the campaign will achieve its longer term goal of
actually getting people to use Internet Explorer. Browsers are such unobtrusive
things when they work well and many people only made the switch to other
browsers when Explorer became virtually impossible to use. To this end, if
you’re happy with your current browser, and the new IE offers a similar
experience, why would you bother to switch back? Microsoft have done a good job
of attempting to wipe the slate clean and starting again with IE, but if they
really want people to embrace the browser in the future they will once again
have to become trendsetters and not simply copycats of already successful
products. The effectiveness of the nostalgia approach is limited, and somehow I can’t
imagine Microsoft waiting another thirteen years before they attempt to make
Internet Explorer appear ‘cool’ again.
