MSN Search commercials - One good, one ugly

05.02.2005 - 10:38 / filled under default

If you don't know it by now: I love good commercials. The Cannes Role? Love it. Shows just made out of good commercials? Love it. In fact, when I am at my mom's home, I am the one sitting in front of the TV and mainly switching around (the programm is crap most of the time anyway) to search for commercials. This even more because I rarely watch TV; last year I had a more frequent phase because of the Olympic Games and a whole night of TV because of the election in US. This somehow describes the complete time I had my TV on last year.

But since the election I have turned on my TV for two times: To see if I really was cut down from 7 programms to 3 with the start of DVB-T in my region (yes) and to watch Dinner for One on New Year's Eve. Since then - nothing. I do watch DVDs from time to time, but mainly on my computer, as I don't own a DVD player. in fact I'll probably go out today and buy me one of my favorite Billy Wilder movies today: One, two, three. (It is a black and white movie and one of the funniest - if you don't know it, go see it.)

My mom has satellite and she has QVC and HOT on it - I absolutly love how they present overpriced crap for 10 minutes explaining all the beautifull aspects of it. And when they present technical gadgets or computers etc I am sitting there giggeling. But back to commercials. How do I watch commercials, when I don't watch TV? I download them (preferred) or see them at websites.

I frequently check the IBM Germany website on their tv commercial page and have a collection of them on my harddisk - back in the days they offered all of them. I don't have all, but some of the most precious. The overall archive is about 2 GB - and just been added have two MSN Search commercials which I found at Mick's principius page:

Now that MSN have officially launched the non-beta version of MSN Search, they have made some TV ads to go along with it…the “Basketball” (.wmv file 1.03MB) ad is nice, but i like the feel and impact of the “A New Way to Search” (.wmv file 1.46MB) ad…

I disagree with 'nice' - the basketball ad just screams Nike all over it (yes, I have them too and like them) and does not involve feelings for the new search. But the second one is a clever one: Go to MSN Search and you will find everything in it.

This is defenetly going out to Joe User, who most of the time does not even understand the difference between the search entry box and the adress box at the top of his browsers. Now he is assured: If I go there, there is everything in it. And I also heard some judgement about "MSN Search finds more than google" - most of the time it does not, but Goolge just displays pages above a certain rank. Joe User just compares 1 Mio entries against just 500.000 - MSN is better.

So the emotional impact on the second ad is great. But I still can't figure why the hell the new MSN has such an ugly layout? And the "add to MSN"-button too? Is this a new style loved in the US? *brrrr*