Tactics to sell IE8: free Nickelback track and vomit

Microsoft offers free Nickelback track for IE8 and debuts commercial featuring a woman throwing up

Microsoft offers free Nickelback track for IE8 and debuts commercial featuring a woman throwing up

Are Microsoft's latest tactics to get folks to download Internet Explorer 8 funny, disgusting, obnoxious or effective? On the one hand, you have the rather pleasant idea that if you download a copy of IE8 you get a never-before released track from rocker band Nickelback. On the other, you have an ad campagn that displays a woman throwing up (multiple times). Not pleasant.

Seriously, I have a sensitive stomach when it comes to someone retching. Thanks to the YouTube commercial embedded below, I now associate IE8 with nausea. It reminds of a few years back when Quiznos launched a national television commercial campaign using mascots that looked -- I kid you not -- exactly like dead curled up, yet talking, rats. They called them sponge monkeys. The commercials were controversial (a local T.V. news program even went so far as to run a story about them). They caused a lot of buzz, and that's one part of what you want advertising to do. But the other part is to create desire in the buyer. Obviously they didn't create a lot of new business for the sandwich chain. A few months later, the mascots were gone. To this day, I have not set foot in a Quiznos ... every time I look at one, I think "dead rats" and there's goes my appetite.

While a browser isn't a restaurant, I now have this strong association of IE8 and puke (the commercial is strangely visual). The point of the ad is that IE8 offers security features such as InPrivate Browsing, so that you can visit nauseating sites on your own computer and no one need ever discover this about you.

As for the Nickelback track, I can go for that. I like the band and can say that at least this is a choice of artist a decade closer to being trendy than was the choice of Jerry Seinfeld. All-in-all though, I wish Microsoft would 1) fire its advertising executives and 2) study Apple's advertising like a football coach studies the film of the team it needs to beat.

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