The Soap Box Derby

By Todd Watson

Todd Watson's extensive forays in to the wilds of cyberspace over the past year were taken very seriously by IBM's Software Solutions Division in Somers, N.Y.-so much that it recently hired him on as its 'electronic media communications specialist." Although he's not yet sure what dangerous undertakings his new job will entail, his virtually adventurous life is sure to become more cybersobering by the light year. In fact, it sounded so serious that Todd decided he'd better step up on his soapbox and poke some fun at advertising campaigns-everyone's-before he himself becomes a monument to Rodin's pensive thinker. Nothing is sacred-Todd leaves no stone unturned in his pursuit of promotional puffery.

Just last year IBM shucked its forty some-odd advertising agencies in favor of consolidating its ad dollars with one behemoth agency, the celebrated Ogilvy and Mather which, before the  transition, was in charge of Microsoft's campaign to billboard the universe. Co-founded by advertising maestro David Ogilvy, who once said that you can't bore people into buying your  product, O&M; has proven that IBM is like a Timex watch - it takes a ...well, you know the  rest.

The change couldn't have come at a more crucial moment. The continuing contest for guiding the future of desktop, client/server, and enterprise systems has never been more zealous. Strategies are being molded around their evolution; careers will be made and broken because of their consequences.

That said, everybody likes a worthy opponent, including those of us at Big Blue. Healthy competition can go a long way towards helping manufacture success--both for our own technologies as well as those of our competitors. None of us lives and works in a vacuum, and competition can help pull our respective sides together as a team during times of turbulence, during periods when rational thought would suggest we should instead be tearing one another limb from limb.

In the truest tradition of an open and competitive free market, rivalries between giants such as Microsoft "Where Do You Want to Go Today?" Corporation, Intel "Do You Have the Power?" Corporation, Digital "I Don't Know Their Slogan But I Do Remember Their New TV Commercials Because They're Like a Cross Between MTV and NYPD Blue" Equipment Corporation, and the like are good, clean, spite-ridden, bloody-knuckled American fun. Despite the fact that I was never a scrapper in grade school, instead firmly adopting that age-old maxim that the pen (okay, the word processor) was mightier than the sword, I've become quite impassioned of late about IBM's hard-target marketing, and am ecstatic that we seem to be getting roused up for the significant, down-in-the-trench skirmishes ahead.



To kick things off, there's been the recent reappearance of the computer company branding campaign. Establishing a brand identity is a Sisyphean chore, I'm sure. More than a few uptown Manhattan advertising executives have pondered such an assignment over too many martinis at Elaine's and have come up dry, not to mention soused. Instead of selling a product, they must sell an image, a concept, an idea of who a company is and what it represents. There's no there there, really. But unlike peddling snake oil out of a covered wagon, there should be some substance behind the slippery veneer of hyperbole.

The word on the street (Madison Avenue, actually) is that the IBM Solutions for a Small Planet campaign has become a big hit, both in the advertising realm and in the computer industry at large. What's not to like? They're sophisticated, worldly, accessible ads. The ads show ordinary people talking amongst themselves in a vacuum of high-tech patois, discussing technological solutions that work beyond physical, geographical, and cultural boundaries. Since the IBM solutions target specific environments and accompanying problems, they invite the audience along for an exciting ride into today's computing, rather than into the ostensibly distant future. While doing so, they keep the wistfulness in check and instead focus on the tangible. And it appears IBM is laughing all the way to the Arbitrons (especially after the oh-so hip AS/400 surfing commercial coup).

Then Microsoft, in its own attempt at establishing a firmer brand identity in the minds of computer users worldwide, began asking that rather open-ended question--"Where do you want to go today?"--with its latest broadcast and print brand campaign. I wonder what Redmond's Windows95 programmers' answer to that question might be. Considering their latest vaporware schedule, it looks as if they've been going anywhere else but to work at the labs in Bellevue. August, they say? Don't hold your breath, if Buggy Beta M8's recent hostile press reception was any indication. And then to have Mr. Gates stand before the computer press corps and announce that 95 is essentially nothing more than another hopscotch square on its way to a full-blown Windows NT!

I may just be a sore underdog, but the Microsoft brand campaign seems to be very similar to the company's software strategy--it sounds like a good idea because it's just chaotic enough that nobody has time to stop and figure out exactly what direction they're going, or when they're going to arrive (with the exception, perhaps, of Judge Sporkin). It's sort of like catching a subway on your first trip to New York City. You have absolutely no idea what you're doing or where you're likely to end up, but you'd better jump on fast or you'll get left behind--or worse yet, end up staring at the cowcatcher of a runaway train.

Where do you want to go today?

Hey, Paris would be nice, seeing as I've only experienced the European continent through my extensive virtual travels. I know, I know, I'm just another ignorant, unilingual, ethnocentric, chauvinistic, paleolithic American male whose one trip outside the U.S. landed him in southern Mexico just in time for last year's uprising in Chiapas. That experience convinced me that had I been in Iran in '79, I would have been one of the first hostages taken.

Of course, Venice wouldn't be so bad either. Ever since I saw a young Diane Lane in A Little Romance I've been a hopeless romantic, waiting impatiently for the day to arrive when I could kiss my sweetheart in one of those gondolas under the Bridge of Sighs just as the sun is setting. Just thinking about it, I get that warm, mushy feeling women can describe so well.

Then again, a trip to Seattle wouldn't be half bad, either. There seem to be a lot of "way hip" young people doing a lot of "way hip" things in that particularly "way hip" city at the moment, and I feel "way left out." Of course, it's so "way close" to Redmond that I might break out in competitive hives, so maybe I'll just stay home after all - there's always Virtual Seattle: http://www.seattle.is.a.way.hip.place.to.be.hip

But like my daddy always said, what I want and what I get are two completely different things. Today, like any other, where I am going is to the office to slave away in front of my PC. Another day, another ''dinero. ''American Express won't let me leave home without paying their bill, corporate card or not, so that means there are articles to write, people to call, products to promote, magazines to produce, articles to write - you get the picture. So where I want to go today has nothing to do with the fact of where I'm likely to end up.

It was probably very similar with the Edsel. Remember the Edsel? Ford Motor Company does, even though they've spent the past 38 years trying to forget about it. Ford (where "Quality is Job One") introduced the Edsel in 1957 and tried to pass it off as the car of the future. Named after Henry Ford's son, the Edsel had it all: doubled headlights, gul-winged rear deck, horse-collar grill, button-operating automatic gears - the works. Everything you could possibly hope for in a car in '57, yet hardly anyone bought it. This was supposed to be the vehicle that would change driving as we knew it. So what happened?

Many observers argued that people just weren't ready for the future. Others pointed out that the car was fabulously ugly. Whatever the reason, the fact still remains that the Edsel was one of the biggest flops of the century. It certainly didn't help matters when, on a live Bing Crosby TV special (which, oddly enough, market the crooner's transition from radio to TV), Rosemary Clooney's Edsel wouldn't crank!.

They say history has a way of repeating itself.

Despite the massive campaign about to be launched by our contemporaries in Redmond, all the activity on the press front suggests that this time the proof had better be in the pudding. Running media interference will be a moot point because people have an alternative - and quite an efficient one, I might add.

See, the movie marketeers in Hollywood have known for decades what mass media-centric advertising agencies seem to so often forget: that empirical, word of mouth promotion is the single most powerful form of persuasion. A personal endorsement from a neighbor down the street or a colleague down the hall carries much more weight than an overstated headline from a print ad or a sound bite from a TV commercial. Likewise, one bad word from a few million good friends can send what was supposed to be the next Jurassic Park into video store purgatory.

So here's my proposal. If you use OS/2 Warp, if you believe in it as a product and a philosophy (Zen and the Art of Warping), as do I, if you use it everyday and feel as though it makes you a more productive individual, then go and tell somebody. It's that simple.

Better yet, approach everybody you know who uses a personal computer--whether they run Windows 3.1, DOS 3.0, Linux, or even C/PM--and tell them all about OS/2 Warp. Tell them about its multitasking and multithreading, about its BonusPak, about its easy-to-use connection to the Internet, about how they can run their native Windows applications, no problemo. Tell them that yes, they can even run their Doom. And all for the price of less than three megs of RAM.

Or even better yet, invite all your friends over to your house. You know, the ones who are absolutely terrified of getting another general protection fault after they've spent days doing an itemized tax return on their PC. The ones who call you in the middle of the night to ask if there's anything they can do to save the letter they were writing to Aunt Edna and which disappeared into thin air. The ones who send you angry e-mail missives about how they're never going to use their "stupid" computer again.

Make it a ''soire. ''Invite them over for a popcorn and soda pop TupperWarp party and show them firsthand what crash protection actually means. Open four or five or even six programs, call up the Internet Connection's WebExplorer and go surfing, print your Great American Novel, and copy a file or two. Make sure you have all the windows open so your audience can watch all this actually going on at once.

Seeing is believing. Turn the concept of multitasking into a tangible demonstration. If you do it right, you're likely to receive a reaction similar to the one received by members of the Silicon Valley Homebrew Computer Club who, way back in 1975, stared in amazement at the 256K Altair 8800. Yes, they may just have been a bunch of blinking lights, but those lights were illuminating the path that led into the future of computing technology.

Finally, tell them that while they wait for the construction of the Great Ark that's supposed to save them from the rising flood of 16-bit misery, they're missing the getaway speedboat.

Believe you me, there's going to be advertising galore. TV commercials will air on every channel from HBO to MTV to Bubba's TV Trash Talkathon. Fancy print spreads will run in major papers around the globe. The World-Wide Web will be riddled with newfangled, fancy promotions designed exclusively for the purpose of sucking your brain into the inner abyss of cyberspace.

But don't buy it. Like New Coke back in 1985, it's all a bunch of hype.

If I were the creative director on this campaign, here would be my scenario for IBM's media riposte:

It's a dark and stormy night. We're in an old house way out by the edge of town. A three day poker game is in the final stretch. The other players got out hours ago. It has all come down to these two contenders. Two cowboys.

The players sport 72-hour shadows. Their eyes are weary and have huge, black circles underneath their lids. The pack of curious spectators standing around the table watches hungrily. They're dying to see who's going to come out on top.

As the dealer shuffles the cards for the final hand, the two adversaries look deep into one another's eyes - cautiously, but with great respect.

All the money is on the table.

The cards are dealt. The two cowboys concentrate, trying to figure out whether or not the other side is bluffing.

The cowboys look over their hands, studying them carefully, then glance suspiciously back up at their opponent. The betting begins and, after raises from either side, just as quickly concludes.

"Whatta ya got?" the one cowboy asks.

The other smiles a knowing smile and lays down his cards.

"Four fours," he says, savoring the moment. "Whatta you got?"

A long pause, then the other cowboy fans out his cards. "Four eights."

But this is old news. IBM layed its hand down a long time ago.