Jeff Bercovici of Portfolio, on the Seinfeld/Gates disaster:
The more I see of Microsoft's new ad campaign starring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, the more I wonder: What were they thinking?The second ad isn't much better, but it does have the guy who played the newspaper managing editor on the last season of "The Wire" as the dad. Posted by Stephen Silver at September 15, 2008 03:34 PMA lot of critics have noted that the ads fail to present any positive argument for Windows. But that's not my problem with them. Nor is it their lack of originality... Nor is it even that they're just not very funny. No, what drops my jaw is that no one at Microsoft or its ad agency (Crispin Porter & Bogusky) considered the significance of Seinfeld-as-metaphor. A towering presence during the 1990s, increasingly irrelevant since then...remind you of any software giants you can think of?
And it's not like those two need the money. I hope to God Seinfeld isn't being paid much, but he probably is.
Posted by: Freddy at September 15, 2008 04:27 PMI like Penny Arcade's take on this as well:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20080915.jpg