Microsoft marketing hits new low

We’ve given Microsoft’s marketing a hard time in this blog before and we’ve also had some nice words to say about them.  But this one takes the cake: if you haven’t seen the new Windows 7 Launch Party campaign and the excruciating videos that support it, you must now drop everything and go see it.

Charlie Brooker, the Guardian columnist says, “It’s so terrible it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment which I like to call ‘shitasmia’”.

In the first of what will surely be a torrent of mashups and re-mixes of this classic piece of marketing wankery, Cabel Sasser — founder of Mac software maker Panic Inc — has remixed the video using bleeps to very funny effect — see it on engadget here.  Spokesmonster was close behind with a comic book version.

I was going to list all the things wrong with this astronomically cringeworthy attempt by Microsoft to social engineer the planet, but what’s the point? Go watch it. This is what happens when a marketing team doesn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, they inject it under their eyelids.

This thing is going viral… but not in the intended way.