BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

There’s no place like home. Especially, when you have a cozy couch where you can cuddle with your loved one in front of the TV. When your loved one, who’s as far from the whole IT stuff as humanly possible, starts commenting on IT-related commercials, it only gets better.

Last night a Microsoft’s commercial popped up, one of the latest “I’m a PC and I was made into a stereotype” ones. My girlfriend somehow missed the introductory phrase, so she only caught the part where a bunch of people say “I’m a PC and this is my cubicle” pointing to couple of icebergs or “I’m a PC and I sell fish”.

The question she immediately asked me had fallen like a hammer of doom. The question was: “Is this a commercial to stop outsourcing? Have all these people lost their jobs to India and now have to sell fish or work on icebergs to feed their families?”.

Having argued that Microsoft had delivered their brand-shaping marketing message quite clearly I got puzzled. The message was, of course, delivered quite clearly. It was also obvious that my girlfriend isn’t the target market for those commercials – she’s not involved in IT-related decision making. However, it was a nice revelation to see how such people react to the imagery used in the ad. Without the online hype, without knowing all the IT stories and how Microsoft is getting back at Apple using similar-looking guy and all that buzz – how would these commercials be perceived.

Now I know. These are the commercials about IT guys who lost their jobs. I’m a PC and I sell fish. How much… ?

Nobody promised anything, but if you have an image search function it better produce some meaningful results. Since Google Images somehow managed to get blocked at the place where I am sitting right now (probably doing too good finding what you’re not supposed to be looking at), I use Yahoo Image search for blog posts.

Boy, is that a sad picture. No matter what I am looking for, Yahoo Images just dumps dozens of result pages from Flickr. If you run a search for “microsoft commercial“, guess what would you see on pages 2 to 16? A whole bunch of images of military airplanes and helicopters – all from Flickr. Only starting at page 16 there are some easily recognizeable Microsoft-related images.

Given that Flickr is blocked here as well, it’s just an exercise in futility to find any sort of images. But this was worth mentioning, because if it wasn’t for a problem with Google Images I would’ve never thought there is really no alternative.

And you thought Yahoo was doing a good job too, right?