Last night I watched some actual television, with the commercial breaks and everything.
So I saw the new Microsoft ads from CP&B about 14 times over the course of a couple of hours.
[Ad frequency in the USA is truly staggering.]
I had the weirdest experience: I could feel my feelings towards Microsoft changing, subtly, each time the commercial shamelessly, blatantly, tugged at my heart strings. I felt, perceptibly, that I liked PCs a little more.
I thought about my Sony Windows laptop, lying neglected, forlorn, in the other room and felt perhaps I should boot it up.
My brain began to reverse engineer my previous memories, eroding the evil empire positioning, re-positioning it as one of a number of perceptions, distancing it from being my belief.
This was an odd feeling.
Each time the ad washed over me I felt a little more part of a PC world, one that I have only recently in fact moved away from.
I started to feel connected to that girl with glasses and that guy who sells fish and the dude with the beard and Bill and Pharrell.
[Not Deepak Chopra though - his fusion of Indian mysticism and garbled expressions from quantum mechanics peddled as healing and self help gets my goat.]
And each time I became more aware of the sensation itself at a different level, at a stage removed as I wondered how this was working and considered the strategy sitting behind it.
[Speaking of misappropriating Indian mysticism] This reminded me of an Indian meditation concept called Vipassana. It's a meditation that allows you be aware of what you experiencing, an awareness of the experience one stage removed, via introspection and that.
I had that, but with ads.
As Eric points out, the campaign is inclusive - most people are part of the PC world already. They just need a little something to let them feel proud about it.
I even liked the Seinfeld ones.
Part of what CP&B are so good at is changing, or re-framing, the conversation around the brand.
