Brian Prentice

If you haven’t seen the Microsoft Jerry Seinfeld & Bill Gates ads you definitely should. It’s marketing history in the making. These ads are soon to join the pantheon of spectacular advertising flops, perhaps even eclipsing Apple’s famous “Lemmings” Super Bowl ad of 1985.

While the blogosphere has been ripping the ads apart for being a bizarre and pointless response to Apple’s successful “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ad campaign – which they are – I think what we actually have here is the classic marketing mistake of too much brand extension.

The problem with brand extension is that sometimes companies go to far . They end up exceeding the customer’s association with their brand’s values and goals. The mistake here, though, is not that Microsoft is over-extending their brand. Nope, they’re actually over-extending the Bill Gates brand!

It seems that the logic is going something like this.

1. Bill Gates = Microsoft and Microsoft = Bill Gates
2. If Bill Gates is seen as a hip, cool celebrity then Microsoft will be seen as a hip, cool company

COME ON JERRY! A couple million dollars worth of Seinfeld’s time to banter with Bill? What’s next, a self-aggrandizing video showing Bill Gates goofing around with the likes of Bono, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and John Stewart?

Oh wait, they did that too!

Affection for Bill Gates runs deep in Redmond, as well it should. And in an age of reckless, greedy and incompetent CEOs Gates has been the poster boy for the astute, aggressively prudent, philanthropic business leader. But it’s time to move on. Bill is retired now – Microsoft needs to let him get on with the great things he wants to do through his foundation. Instead, Gate’s is like Microsoft’s Michael Corleone – just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in.

The celebrity status of Bill Gates is not going to make Microsoft “Apple Cool.” And let’s face it, besides a brief moment in 1995, Microsoft has never really been a cool company. Last time I checked their revenue figures that hasn’t appeared to have been hurting them too much.

Why not? Because at the end of the day in the IT industry relevance trumps cool. And there’s still no IT company that is more relevant to more people doing more things than Microsoft. They haven’t achieved this through a personality cult but through one of the most innovative and enduring business models in the industry. Taking cues from IBM’s famous “e-Business” campaign of the late 90’s would probably be a better way to get that message across then getting all bent out of shape because Apple is having a laugh at their expense.

Ultimately, Microsoft’s public persona needs to break up with Bill. And if they can finally find the courage to do it they can use the classic Seinfeld line, “It’s not you Bill, it’s me.”