What Is Awesome » advertising http://whatisawesome.com A collection of the fascinating, entertaining, technological, humorous, and inspiring Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:28:31 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Why does Microsoft make terrible promotional videos? http://whatisawesome.com/2009/01/11/why-does-microsoft-make-terrible-promotional-videos/ http://whatisawesome.com/2009/01/11/why-does-microsoft-make-terrible-promotional-videos/#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:16:33 +0000 Ian http://whatisawesome.com/?p=119 I came across a video for a pretty cool new product from Microsoft Research called Songsmith. The program takes a song that you sing as input and automatically adds the musical components to it. This is a pretty neat idea that should be easy and fun to promote. It was almost hard to believe, let alone sit through, the promotional video for it on YouTube:

In a way, I wasn’t so surprised. Actually, this is just the most recent in a long line of poorly produced promotional videos for the software giant. Need proof? There’s a decent chance you may have already seen this gem promoting Windows 386 from years ago.

Then there’s this old ad from Japan:

Let’s not forget about this one either:

Sometimes the ads don’t make that much sense:

Sure, there are some decent commercials too. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld ads which aired a while ago. I guess I’m just surprised that such a successful company has done such a phenomenal job of mucking up promotions for their own products.

]]> http://whatisawesome.com/2009/01/11/why-does-microsoft-make-terrible-promotional-videos/feed/ 0