Songsmith ads - Enough to put you off music for life

As expounded elsewhere, last year brought with it a slew of mad and bad ads for techy products. Nintendo’s Wii campaigns for Animal Crossing and Mario Kart Wii were plain embarrassing. Meanwhile, PC World’s spots for its range of bog-standard laptops addressed their audience like remedial children in attempting to hoodwink us into believing that being able to surf the web, while playing games and listening to music was a bold step into the future.

However, with the year but days old, the new ad for Microsoft’s challenger to Garageband might just have trumped last year’s efforts in a trice. Don’t believe me? Have a look for yourselves.



See what I mean? What in the name of arse has possessed Microsoft? Rather than actually making an ad that might impress us with the product’s functionality, they’ve instead made an ad so appalling that it seems that they’re hoping that we’ll buy Songsmith just to make them stop showing it.

What’s appears to have happened is that the agency creatives pitched an idea to make the ads really kitsch. That actually might have worked. But somewhere along the line those good intentions were focus-grouped into oblivion, so what you’re left with is a spot where you can no longer tell whether the cheesiness is intentional or otherwise. Thus, instead of Songsmith’s ad (there’s a spirit-sapping four-minutes of it!) being so good it’s bad, it’s so bad it’s unwatchable.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for shonky ads as the year goes by and naming and shaming the worst at the end of the year. Think of it as a public service. But if you, dear readers, espy anything before we do please send them to digitalmanblog@hotmail.com and we’ll put them to the sword. Keep ‘em peeled.