ICM - Leeds Design Agency

Can you make things cool?

Not in a refrigeration sense of the word obviously.

It was announced recently in the Wall Street Journal that Microsoft is about to spend $300 million dollars on making their brand ‘cool’.

Probably a similar sort of ‘cool’ to that of Apple.

Call me cynical (and slightly bias) but I don’t think its possible. With Microsoft you’re trying to make an operating system cool. With Apple you’ve got a great looking product, a far superior operating system, and a ‘way of life’ buy-in that Microsoft could only dream of.

Yes, us Mac-users are a little smug and self-congratulatory. What’s wrong with that?

I’m sure the guy with an Audi RS4 is slightly more smug than the guy with a Hyundai Sonata.

Over recent years Apple has used celebrities in its advertising, with the likes of Bob Dylan, who has promoted iTunes, and Jeff Goldblum, who appeared in a number of ads promoting Apple computers.

Microsoft have elected comedian Jerry Seinfeld to boost sales of their ailing Vista operating system. They’ve also enlisted the help of a ‘cool’ agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

Rumours in the Wall Street Journal suggest Microsoft won’t rely entirely on celebrity endorsement for the ‘cool’ campaign, and is likely to include footage of a group of students who said that they did not like Vista and instead were trying out a version of Windows called Mojave. At the end, they are told that the software was actually Vista.

Can you hear something? Yes, its the nerd alarm going off. Not cool.

Save your money Bill, its not going to work.