Staying Power

The results are in! Microsoft has announced that their somewhat "weird" campaign featuring Jerry Sienfeld and Bill Gates launched last September is a success. They stated that their market share is up by 10% since the campaign started. I really never stayed involved long enough to appreciate why these guys were invading an ordinary household or how they even got together in the first place. It appears, however, that maybe it wasn't the message of the ads, but the fact that the publicity the ads got was equal to four or five times the cost of the media buy.

This is some what of a revelation in that the cardinal rule for using celebrity testimonials has also been their relevancy to the product. Simply put, the more people could identify with the celebrity actually using the product he or she was endorsing, the more credible (and consquently, effective) the message would be. I guess now the rule is if you use enormously powerful people in your spots, the public relations effort will carry the day, regardless of how good the actual commercials are. Imagine how it could work if the spots delivered the message in a more creative and entertaining way. It's a new world out there.