Under waves of ever-increasing competition from Mozilla, Safari, and Google, Microsoft has released a series of edgy, PSA-style online videos to promote Internet Explorer 8.
Featuring one-time Lois and Clark actor Dean Cain, the ads are uncharacteristically hip and discuss such real-world Internet problems as the fear of missing something (a.k.a. insomnia by social media) and the fear of your S.O. finding your porn cache. However, at least one of the videos was just too cool for Microsoft. After becoming strangely popular and talked-about online, the video was renounced by the software mega-company and pulled from the promotional website. Somewhere tonight, a creative director weeps.
A Microsoft rep wrote in an email to CNET, “We created the… video as a tongue-in-cheek look at the InPrivate Browsing feature of Internet Explorer 8, using the same irreverent humor that our customers told us they liked about other components of the Internet Explorer 8 marketing campaign. While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it.”
The spot itself features a young lady spewing copious amounts of what used to be breakfast on a young man. She’d borrowed his laptop and evidently stumbled upon some hideous new Rule 34 form of online entertainment. The ad serves to highlight IE8’s sneaky no-history InPrivate browsing feature.
The ads are, as a group, delightfully off-brand. They’re too cool for Microsoft, which has generally dwelt somewhere between stodgy and cutesy in terms of marketing.
Better still, they show that Microsoft just might be listening to what users really need: Web Slices to get quick views of personally important sites without wasting unnecessary time browsing between full-on tabs; sharing accelerators for sending along lolcats or other media with a single right-click; and yes, a way to keep the missus from finding out about your love affair with Suicide Girls.
The features are nifty in themselves. We’d totally use them if we weren’t already committed to Chrome and Firefox.
