Why the New Microsoft Ad Is Actually Brilliant

Silicon Valley insiders and the early adopter crowd seem to hate the new Microsoft ad. So maybe it’s on target.

So Microsoft debuted its long-anticipated, $300 million marketing campaign today. And the initial reviews — at least from the tech and early adopter gang — aren’t all that kind.

VentureBeat sniffs that the campaign opener, a quirky 90-seconds of comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Microsoft founder Bill Gates talking shoes and technology, is “awkwardly odd” and really not very good. The First Bill Gates + Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft Ad Makes No Sense moans Gizmodo. Conversation on Twitter is almost uniformly negative.

There’s no denying the ad is, at first, a bit puzzling. Perhaps people were expecting something a bit slicker from the folks at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, the überhip agency hired to rescue Microsoft from a decade of marketing cruft and miscues. Watch the video above and see for yourself.

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How Cuil Is It to Misspell Your Brand Name?

The search game got a little more interesting Monday with the launch of Cuil, the next Google wannabe. But it was a rough first day.

Everybody loves a giant killer, so there was no shortage of online ink today over the public debut of Cuil, a new engine which claims to search “more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.”

Cuil couldn’t fail to whistle up a tempest of launch coverage. Staffed by former Google employees with $33 million worth of investment capital at their backs, the secretive startup hinted at a new kind of search based on content, rather than link popularity (an oversimplification of Google’s methodology). All very exciting stuff.

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