Cool Brand Research Site and BillG – Jerry ad #2

There is this cool site called:  brandtags.net, which tells you exactly what people think of your brand.  I learned about the site from newsletter i get from AdAge, here’s the full length article.  When you go to the site, it randomly displays a logo of a company, user is asked to type one word/phrase response when they see that logo (tagging).  Thus the name Brand Tags.  At first it made no sense to me, but when i looked at this page , it gave me insight into what consumers think of when they recall a brand.  Very interesting concept.  So for fun, of course i wanted to compare Google and Microsoft.  Google had lot of tags as, ones that stood out most to me were:  amazing, awesome, big brother, cool, god, information, innovative, Internet, and search.  That gives you really good idea of what people think of when they see Google logo.  Privacy is of course one of the main concerns consumers have, but they also find company “innovative” and “cool”.  A recent poll by Businessweek ranks Google at #7 in the list of top fifty employers to launch career with (Microsoft is at #13).  Going back to BrandTags.net, i looked up Microsoft and tags associated with that brand were:  big, bill gates, boring, computers, crap, crash, evil, monopoly, software, windows.  hmmm, lot of people associate Microsoft with Bill Gates, Windows, and Monopoly not surprisingly.  Overall, it is interesting to do brand comparisons and get an idea of what people think of when they see a company’s logo.

Now let’s talk about BillG and Jerry’s ad #2.  Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the link to the Ad#2.  So this is full length ad and of course TV is not going to show 4 min ad.  Part 2 makes little more sense to me, than the first one did.  This ad is about connecting with people and actually understanding what they want from MSFT products.  Would like to see what 30/60 second ad would look like and which parts they would edit out.  I still think, ad lacks substance and the story line, it is different though.  Oh also, BillG is a good actor 🙂  Other ad that i have seen running is about Mojave Experiment, which is cool, just wish they showed what people were looking at and saying “WoW” to.

T-man

Google Chrome and Today’s Stock Price Drop

Google Chrome came as total surprise to me.  But why not?  Makes sense from Google’s POV.  However, i think it is going to do more harm to FireFox than to IE.  Have i downloaded it?  Nope.  If i’m not going to download IE8 beta, why should i download Chrome Beta?  Plus Chrome has lot of features that IE 8 does (no, it’s not other way around).  Either way, great move by Google.

Today Google stock price drop drastically.  Silicon Valley Insider blog has pretty interesting insight:  “Wall Street Journal – The Justice Department has secretly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. Vice Chairman Sandy Litvack, for a possible court challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising.”  Really?  that’s interesting.

Oh another interesting thing is, Yahoo promoting Firefox on their homepage.  This was actually happening before Chrome came out.

Why all the hate?

Lot of people have written about the latest Microsoft ad (Bill G and Seinfield ad).  Yeah at first look, it didn’t make sense to me either.  What was the ad about anyways?  They did not talk about anything until the last 10 seconds, what was that about?  Just like outside, internally there was also lot of discussion about this ad.  Here’s my view:  we are used to seeing one thing or another being sold to us in every ad.  Be it, iPhone, car, food, whatever the case might be.  MSFT ad was different.  It didn’t want to sell anything, it is building up to a bigger story.  Hopefully 2nd ad will make more sense and add to the overall story.  Why does ad have to sell something, why can’t it be a story line?  Plus it served the purpose it intended to do:  to generate buzz (unfortunately, mostly it was negative).

Instead everyone jumps on a dislike the ad bandwagon, because it is NEW concept and more importantly it is by Microsoft, so just because couple of the blogs said, it is horrible.  Everyone says, yeah it must be.  We let other external factors cloud our judgement.  Basically, we do not have our own view of things or do not know what/how to think.

Yeah first ad did not make sense, so give it a chance.  Let’s see if the new upcoming ads will add to the story line and make more sense.