Remi Andre

Oh, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, you have done it again! After rolling out two Seinfeld ads that went nowhere (and you would have to be be drinking the Kool Aid as heavily as Paul Thurrott to believe that was the plan all along!), and then telling the world that even 4, 7, and 11 year olds can use Vista’s photo feature (apparently the only feature worthwhile advertising), we now get this…

Where to start… First, “Lauren” is not a “real” person, but an actress. Shocking, I know, but Microsoft and CP+B is trying to tell the world otherwise. And far be it from me to point out how little aforementioned Thurrott knows about marketing, but when he says The message, obviously, is that by ‘cool enough’ she means ‘rich enough.’ Not quite that simple. The reason they picked Lauren, with her green scarf and denim jacket, is that she kinda sorta does look cool. And the message Microsoft is trying to sell is that you can be cool and buy a PC for a cheaper price. The message is that PC users are cool and down to earth and budget conscious, while Mac users are paying a higher price to feel cool. Obviously.

This comes back to why Microsoft hired CP+B to start of with. CP+B, like Microsoft, really really really wants to be cool. They want to be the iPod of the advertising industry. And seeing that can never happen, they’ve gone with… the Zune… Not that I blame them, of course, Microsoft is a big contract and all. But when an uncool ad agency is trying to make an uncool company look cool, it really just comes off as a poser ad agency trying to make a company of stodgy old business men look like posers.

The message I came away with after watching this ad? “PCs are for posers.”