On Internet Business

When bad advertising goes good

Posted by Michael under Social Media

Microsoft profits leaped by 60% in the final quarter of 2009 and the company has claimed this is owing to the ‘heavyweight marketing campaign’ for Windows 7 which is an amazing response given that the advertising was roundly, widely and deeply panned by industry watchers – blogger after blogger and advertising commentator after advertising commentator said the adverts, especially those for Windows 7 ‘parties’ were uniformly awful.

So how did the operating system become the best-selling operating system to date?

Partly because the adverts weren’t aimed at the industry experts but at the vast underbelly of people who have to use a computer for work or study but whose understanding of the systems involved is as limited as the average person’s understanding of the internal combustion engine – it turns out that this huge section of society was perfectly happy with advertising that the cognoscenti described variously as patronising, painful or just plain bad.

Microsoft admits it was assisted by a rebound in personal computer sales in the run-up to Christmas, partly resulting from the last minute investment in laptops as Christmas gifts, but it does seem to have found a level of communication with the bulk of the marketplace that’s worked well.

And so to the iPad, derided on release by the Guardian Newspaper the Wall Street Journal, to name but two. Good product, Bad name, was how most people described the new product and while there are minor concerns about its functionality (why no Flash support?) the major one has been over the name. The number of jokes about it on Twitter led to #iTampon becoming a trending topic. Several high profile women in the technical and media industries have made terse comments about the way that the name seems to suggest sanitary protection and expressed concern that either (a) something must have gone wrong in development for there not to have been a single woman in the many brainstorming meetings around the name who could point out the obvious connotations or (b) they pointed them out and were overruled anyway, which smacks of a patriarchal approach to selling the product.

The question for Apple is whether they, like Microsoft, have got around the gatekeepers of technical development and reached right down to the potential buyer – given that at the press conference, Steve Jobs described the product as ‘so much more intimate than a laptop’ – apparently without irony, it seems unlikely that Apple had understood the way the name might be viewed rather than being confident that the industry response and the public response would be differently graduated, as in the Microsoft case.

Apple are very quiet about this avalanche of wit at the iPad’s expense, suggesting that they’re caught out by the media attention and public fun being had at their expense. If this is the case, it’s a rare example of Apple being wrong-footed in marketing, but the next six months will show if they can still turn bad advertising, and bad publicity, into good sales.

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