There's also the minor matter of Apple accusing Microsoft of spending money on advertising that would be better allocated to fixing Vista. The message, of course, is delivered in an expensive advertising campaign, the week after Apple released brand new, prohibitively expensive laptops. Justin Long's Mac moves on to criticize Microsoft's 'reluctance' to call Vista by its real name, which is either a misguided dig at the Mojave campaign or some kind of odd jab at the logical dropping of the 'Vista' name for Windows 7.
Everyone expects misinformation and questionable techniques in advertising, but that's not the issue here. These ads seem directed at Microsoft's corporate management, not their customers. Redmond and Cupertino are having a useless, protracted argument with each other, unaware of the fact that their shouting is going completely over everyone else's heads. [MacRumors]

Lee Iacocca - Chrysler - 1984

Any ad that has the company's CEO starting things off saying, "Well, when you've been kicked in the head like we have..." is going to get attention. After taking a $1.5 billion bailout from the government, Chrysler brought in Lee Iacocca from Ford to right the ship. There are more homespun self-deprecating zingers than you can keep up with. Other spots even featured Iacocca's famous "If you find a better car, buy it" tagline—basically hard-ass sarcasm aimed at potential customers. Hyping new and future cars as being "not bad for a company that had one foot in the grave" is honest to the point of self-destruction, but it's promising improvements.

"They tried to show this charismatic leadership that was going to fix it all, and Iococca himself got out there and he was really, really good at it. People actually were proposing he run for president after these," says Bob Thompson, a professor of media studies at Syracuse. Apparently it's too bad for Microsoft that the Mojave spots don't feature a screaming Ballmer.

GTE Telephone, Los Angeles, 1970
GTE telephone service in Los Angeles in the 1970s was apparently so shitty that the company ran an ad campaign that got written up in Time Magazine for its zaniness:

The neat middle-aged executive peers out from the television screen. "Hello," he says, his face crinkling into a sheepish grin. "I'm from General Telephone." Boos and hisses explode off-camera. "Now, I'm aware that General Telephone provides less than adequate service." Plop. A rotten tomato slides down his chin. "But we're spending $200 million in California this year on improving our service." He is hit with an egg. "Cables, switches, personnel, everything." A cream pie splatters over his face. "Thank you for your patience," he mumbles through the goo.

The spots were put together by DDB, the mega-firm responsible for the Volkswagen "Lemon" campaign that is generally regarded as the best ad of all time. It also used some reverse-psychology voodoo, but in the more traditional sense of treating perceived negatives as positives.

That's a Saturn? - 2006

Car companies are great at this. Taking the conception of a Saturn as a prissy, gutless nerdmobile and moving it up front here obviously makes today's model seem all the more shockingly stunning. Mmm hmm. And of course, on the same theme, we all remember this tune:

Sure, Fords used to suck, but have you driven one....lately?

Prudential Securities - 1994
Facing a huge fraud scandal, Prudential's comeback "Straight Talk" campaign is a perfect example of corporate damage control, using chief exec Hardwick Simmons (yes, real name) in a no-frills admission of guilt. NY Times says:

The campaign, by Deutsch/Dworin Inc. in New York, is imbued with cues intended to underscore the "straight talk" theme. The television commercials and print advertisements, which eschew celebrity endorsers, feature Prudential employees, from brokers to Mr. Simmons, who is called by his nickname, Wick.

The campaign also rejects slick, glitzy production values, using instead a minimalist approach: black-and-white photography, seemingly unrehearsed remarks read off note paper and directed at the camera.

"I'm straight with people and I expect the same," Mr. Simmons says in one commercial, "from my brokers to my kids." In a print version, in which frank statements are superimposed over his photograph so that he stands behind them — get it? — he declares straight talk "also means facing up to hard issues — admitting mistakes and fixing them."

Avis - We Try Harder - 1962

And why do they try harder? Because they're #2. In competition with #1 Hertz, Avis cranked on all the positives that being the cute, hard-working underdog can bring. And they're using the same tagline to this day.

"This was an incredibly effective, incredibly powerful campaign," says Thompson. They acknowledged that they were number two and used it as an asset to sell. We're going to be runnning faster, trying harder, etc. Turned a liability into a huge asset."

All of these campaigns are about putting the dark past behind us in exchange for a shiny next generation of new and improved products and services. But with Vista, where is the new product? What's going to replace users' frustrations? Telling them they're too stupid to cut through all the bad Vista press and realize what a gem they've been missing out on will not make people feel great about themselves or the future of Windows.

"It is a useless exercise to take an unchanged product and try to persuade people that their perceptions are wrong. Vista has a bad reputation because it doesn't work well. It is an earned reputation, the only way to address it...is to change," says Bob Garfield, an advertising journalist who writes for Ad Age and other publications. "I haven't seen anyone I can think of try to do this with a discrete product, as opposed to a service."

The intended audience here is obviously novice users. But novice users aren't dumb users. The first question this campaign pops into those peoples' heads is, "Why have so many people said that Vista sucks?" They're going to research it. They're going to find out. A trick like Mojave isn't going to fool them.

Before the comments erupt into flames, it should be obvious that this is not about Vista sucking or not, but whether the newest Vista ads suck or not. Should a huge, important company have thought twice before doing something so kamikaze-like? Desperation calls for desperate measures, but unfortunately for Microsoft, kamikazes are rarely on the winning side.

There are surely way more instances of this happening—shoot any more great "we suck" ads in the comments.

[Big thanks to Ray at Jalopnik, Bob Garfield, Prof. Bob Thompson, Kipp Cheng at AAAA and Prof. Don Sexton at Columbia Business School]

What's interesting about this experiment is that sure, people who don't know anything/enough about Vista are kneejerking their way into hating it. These people are the ones that are easily convinced with a slight-of-hand that Vista is good. But what they didn't show was the day-to-day usage of Vista, like accidentally installing an XP printer driver and not being able to print. Sure, we like Vista just fine, but this demographic that Microsoft has in its video would be just the kind to not really be tech savvy enough to fix the aforementioned printer problem.

What can we conclude from the Mojave experiment? Pretty much exactly what we thought of Vista: that it's not that bad. Definitely not as bad as these people previously thought.

However, this is a video of people clueless about what Vista looks like in the first place. No Gizmodo readers would fall for such a ruse. Here's a video there of a guy recognizing Mojave as Vista:

Kudos to Windows Marketing for including cases like this, because there's no way that the public perceptions of Vista being not all that great/bad are solely based on prejudice. But maybe, just maybe, a lot of it is. [Mojave Experiment]

Cnet has already seen the footage of the focus groups lovin' it, and Ina suspects the video might go public as part of the campaign to tell Vista's "story" as early as next week. While the whole thing is ultimately a marketing campaign, it does raise an interesting point—how much of the Vista hate is really just sheeple bleating what everyone else is? Chen and I use it everyday (though I use it three times as much as he does), and it's really not Microsoft's most epic fail ever. It's got problems, but what OS doesn't?

Still, it's interesting that the crux of Microsoft's giant campaign is telling everyone that they are wrong, like the-sun-revolves-around-the-earth kind of wrong. I mean, they might be. But it still seems like a weird way to convince people to buy your product. [Cnet via Ars]

"Our company's goal has always been to build rocket-powered vehicles that can be flown and operated like regular aircraft," says Xcor Aerospace president Jeffrey Greason, who claims that Lynx is relatively environmentally friendly: "They are fully reusable, burn cleanly, and release fewer particulates than solid fuel or hybrid rocket motors," he claims.

Unlike the space shuttle, which shuts off its engine and glides into land, the Lynx will have the ability to fire up its engines and re-attempt landing in the event of a borked descent. Fifty test flights have been scheduled, starting in 2010, and, once fully operational, the spacecraft is expected to make several flights per day.

The company will not be selling tickets directly but, rather, will be licensing flight sales to space-adventure tourism companies. There are already plans afoot for the Lynx Mark 2, which will allow space-heads to be in orbit for longer. Funding for the project comes from the Air Vehicles Directorate of the US Air Force Research Laboratory, as well as additional sources—as yet, un-named. [New Scientist]