rumors fly that fallon has won microsoft

Rumors are starting to fly that Microsoft has chosen Fallon Minneapolis to handle its creative advertising account, beating out Miami hot shop Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. If the rumors are true, this would be a huge win for the struggling Minneapolis shop in terms of both its accounting and its prestige.

Fallon has gone through significant downsizing since losing the Subway account in late 2005, capping the trend off with an awful 2007 that saw the BMW, Citibank, Bahamas Tourism and United Airlines accounts also leave the agency. The account and resulting personnel loss has been so bad that Fallon was forced to leave its swanky digs in the Dorsey building on 6th Street and head back to the office it moved from in the “asparagus building.” Sure, everyone liked the old offices better, but it is an admission of significant troubles at the iconic Minneapolis shop.

Recently, things have started to change for the better. Fallon won the Equinox account and launched their new campaign and has made some very good hires.

The Microsoft win would cap off the turnaround in style and set the agency up with momentum, a huge client win and a shootout victory over the hottest agency in the country, all boding well for the balance of 2008.

The Microsoft used to be handled by behemoth McCann Erickson.

microsoft is a poisoned chalice

While I am cheering for Fallon to win the creative duties for Microsoft because they are the hometown team and have been doing good project work for the brand for some years now, it may be a poisoned chalice.

All the sweet advertising goodness in the whole world is not going to overcome the fact that Vista is crap…and everyone knows it. Testers, benchmarks and performance indicators all show that Vista is slower and performs worse than XP, the system it is supposed to replace.

People know this and are complaining. AdPulp has it on the front page today:

Thankfully I, like all hipster creative urbanites, am on a Mac.

Say that Fallon does beat Crispin to the Microsoft account, what’s next? How can you advertise for, how can you try to convince people to buy something that is simply not as good as the previous version? It’s impossible.

It’s especially impossible in this day of, as Tangerine Toad coined, The Real Digital Revolution where consumers can immediately find out if the product is not as good as advertised. And then they won’t buy it. No matter how creative, convincing, or whatever the ad campaign might be.

Losing this pitch will be a blessing in disguise.

The product is inferior and consumers will not want to buy it. When Vista does not sell well, the agency will get the blame because A) agencies are supposed to sell and B) it’s easier for a company to blame the agency and replace them than to admit that what they are trying to sell is complete crap.

Should Fallon win and then quickly be axed when sales, predictably, do not improve it will be the expected death-blow for the agency. Or at least another severe body blow. And how many of those can one agency take?

Of course, should they lose this pitch can Fallon even be considered relevant anymore? Or are they just a mid-level player with a glorious history on big brands that they can’t hope to win these days?

I wish them success, but caution that success in this case is hard to define.