TVision Technology Limited
Microsoft: Keep it Weird keep it clean.
26th March 2009
Eric Ryan is a real person, co-founder of Method, an innovative cleaning products company. His caricatured appearance on the recent Microsoft television advertisements have started rumours that the character is based on Bill Gates. It probably doesn’t help that as a brand name, “Method” is still relatively new in the UK and so we see the word and think that Bill Gates is about to tell us how Microsoft help businesses to work more effectively, which is what it’s about.
The advert has been heralded as “innovative” and a refreshing move away from previous Microsoft campaigns that have felt to be on the boring side of safe. The message isn’t about a product; it’s about how Microsoft is an enabler behind some of the world’s most interesting companies, BT, Quiksilver and Method to name three in the series.
The richness of the Pythonesque animation gives the feel of a coded message so perhaps it is not surprising that it is easy to think it is being ultra-clever. We’re told that Method is in the business of making soap, and so they are. Microsoft uses soap too: Simple Object Access Protocol, a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services. The stress on keeping things “Open” could be seen as a metaphor to the open source nature of the Dynamics solutions or more generally the need to share information across systems. The Cookie metaphor could relate to a reluctance to follow rigid systems (“cookie cutter”) and instead be more flexible. It also suggests a reference to HTML cookies, used on websites to maintain specific information about users, such as site preferences, that aid in saving time without being prescriptive on what you can do.
The advert works as it grabs attention immediately and then fascinates with its suggestion of many layers. I even found myself pausing to examine the contents of the “mixing bowl” (a bicycle, bottle opener, umbrella, camera, aeroplane, head) then decided to take a more surrealist view that this is a reference to the beauty in the “Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella”, purely there to reinforce the Method Mission Statement, Keep it Weird. It is also about flexibility in systems that help people try new things and share ideas. Technology enabling people to push uniqueness in their business: Keeping it weird but also keeping it extremely practical, just like Method.
