Microsoft has bought out an enormous hallway in Terminal eight at JFK Airport in New York, to advertise Office 2007. The campaign consists of giant posters, about fourteen giant flat screen displays, insipid music, and terminals where you can play an interactive Office 2007 advertisement game.
The campaign is reminiscent of Apple’s iPod campaign in the BART/Muni stations in downtown San Francisco — both are immersive advertising for a product that claims to be a lifestyle revolution. But that’s where the similarity ends.
Apple’s campaign was just stylized pictures of a simple product that everybody understood from the beginning. The iPod was advertised as a revolution in people’s musical lifestyle, and (perhaps because of the advertising), it has been. A public transit station is a place people pass through quickly, having just completed, or about to begin, a short journey on which music might help pass the time. They feel urban and hip, because they are taking the subway. (There are no iPod advertisements on the bus, even though the morning bus from the Marina is a sea of white ear buds.)
Microsoft’s Office 2007 campaign consists of pictures of attractive yet sanitary people at sunrise (or sunset), outdoors, presumably on their way to, or home from, work, in cities like New York and Paris. The slogan is “Today won’t just be another day at the office.”
This is wrong in so many ways. First, Office 2007 is not an iPod. It is not a personal lifestyle revolution, not even to the most boring of accountants. It’s not a simple product that everyone understands and anyone could use. And an airport is not a place you pass through quickly, wishing you could be editing your PowerPoint presentations at that very moment. An airport is a place nobody wants to be — you’ve just been harassed by security, or you’ve just endured a flight that was nasty, brutish, and long, and now you just want to be home. And the insipid music actually made me want to switch on my unPod.
Now, compare this with Apple’s iPhone campaign, which, underneath all the hype, has been showcasing each and every feature of a product that is not simple, making it completely clear why the iPhone is so revolutionary.
Why isn’t Microsoft actually showing the reasons why they think Office 2007 will be so revolutionary? The unfortunate truth is that Office 2007 is not that much different from Office 2003 (I was forced to subject myself to the beta a few months back, for work) and also probably that the features that are notable are far too complex to explain, even in that behemoth hallway at JFK.
Sorry, Microsoft. You’re not Apple, and Office 2007 is neither an iPod, nor an iPhone. I’m sure there’s an accountant somewhere who wet their pants when they last traveled through your hallway at JFK. But you sure wasted a bunch of money on them.