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.
