Not that this is uncharted territory (it’s building off of Michel Gondry’s work, and most likely countless others before him), but it’s definitely pushing the boundaries further than I’ve ever seen them pushed before.

What’s amazing about this, and the kind of work that Gondry does in ‘Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground‘ is that the spectacle itself is theatrical in nature.  It’s not something that could only be done on video and edited together in post.  It’s something you could experience live — but which you happen to be watching on film.

This ad takes the theatrical paradigm a step further — it’s a very post-modern interaction with video, complete with Noh theater style invisible stage hands (Kohken) moving the projection surfaces on and off the stage.

This is the kind of work I want to do in terms of using projections and video in theater.  It seems like a pretty limitless frontier.

Now I just need a little bit of money… and I should be all set. :)

Thanks DesignNotes for pointing this one out.

UPDATE: I just changed out the video embed code.  For full effect, switch to HD and watch it in full screen.  It’ll blow your mind.

I’m not sure who’s behind this ad, or even if it’s real or photoshopped, but I think it’s really clever.

via FFFFound

what are you doing, Steve?

Over the weekend, a lot of dirty laundry was aired about Microsoft’s anti-Apple campaign, including:

1. The entire campaign was created on Macs, as evidenced by metadata scraped from some of the ad campaign’s photos.
2. The ad agency behind the campaign, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, was profiled a few months ago on Apple’s Pro site as being fanatical Apple users.
3. Microsoft’s Mojave experiment — designed to convince users to take another look at Vista — apparently fudged a lot of its numbers.
4. The Times quote that Microsoft uses on all of their campaigns, ‘Windows Vista is beautiful,’ was apparently taken out of the context of a highly critical David Pogue article, in which he talks about how clunky the OS is and how most of the interface was ripped off from Apple.
5. RoughlyDrafted wrote a concise, chilling rebuttal to Paul Thurrott calling Apple ‘the Bad Guys’ and ‘liars’ for exposing Vista’s flaws (which brings up a very good point — could Microsoft possibly make the argument that MacOS has huge flaws?  I’d like to see that one.)

All of this adds up to what looks like a huge embarrassment for Microsoft.

Ok.  It’s better than the Seinfeld ads.  I’ll give it that.  But that’s not that much.

My beef with it is this: these people are not cool (that’s the point, right?).  They’re fine.  They seem perfectly nice.  But the thing the Mac vs PC commercials got right was the attitude of the Mac.  He just seems like a great, smart guy who you’d want to have a drink with.  You want to hang out with that guy.  You want to be that guy.  So in the traditional advertising sense, they’re selling you an image: buy a Mac and you can be cool.

So fine.  Not all ads have to play into that old-school ad logic.  What does this ad have to say for itself?

What this ad tells me is that many dull people who lead semi-adventurous lives are already using Windows.  I knew that.  They all seem like people who are not particularly savy or tasteful — and wouldn’t necessarily know the difference between a Mac and a PC.  Or, like, they get grant money from Microsoft so they have to buy PCs.

With this crowd it doesn’t seem like an issue of taste or any sort of discerning opinion. As a savy (albeit ferociously pro-Mac) technology consumer, I don’t get the idea from the commercial that this product will help me lead a more productive, fun life.  It just proves that too many other people of all walks of life use PCs.

As far as I know, Microsoft is losing market share to Apple primarily in the 18-25 range. That age range cares more about looks, ease of use, and general coolness quotient far more than the fact that a large number of older people do their perfectly interesting jobs just fine in spite of the fact that they own PCs.

So what’s the point?  To make people who already have PCs feel like they’re in good company? Maybe.  I guess that’s valuable.  But then this whole campaign is more of Microsft trying to plug the dam of the outflow of users — rather than a counter-attack.

Safety.  Make people feel safe and secure in the boring products they already own.

I guess it’s just what you’d expect from Microsoft.

This morning I thought it’s perhaps time to get to the bottom of this: which ad firm has the monumental task of trying to make Microsoft look cool.

The answer? Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Apparently the go-to people for when your company is completely out of touch but you want to be perceived as being ‘with it.’ (you can read more about them on Ajax Blog)

While I have to say they’ve been doing a pretty pathetic job on the Microsoft campaign so far, I was at least curious enough to check out what else they’d done.  Turns out many things.  This was my favorite:

I hadn’t seen that round of VW commercials — the only ones I’ve seen are the talking car/brooke shields ones which are not as funny.

So they can do something right, I guess.  We’ll have to wait and see how the Microsoft campaign goes.  I can’t imagine any other outcome than the commercials being kind of ok — at best — but mostly serving as an excellent set up for a hilarious Apple counter-attack.

A Microsft engineer who looks like John Hodgeman whining about how ‘I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype’? Come on!  Does it get any easier than that?

BTW – Apple’s market share is up to 10.6% in North America.