Microsoft Wants The Surface Studio To Inspire You

Microsoft Wants The Surface Studio To 

Come with me, and you’ll be, in a world of marketing innovation.

The internet hates ads. Hates them. But it loves ads for new gadgets.

The internet invented ad blockers to stamp them out, it cries out in one voice if it suspects it’s being sold to, and it has been usurping the traditional model of showing people stuff they might want to spend money on for years.

Traditional advertisers have shunned marketing norms and tried to reinvent the ad as we know it. In a bid to circumvent the angry mob, the advertising industry leaps forward, finding new ways to deploy humor and sex to sell you products.

The festival of advertising known as the Super Bowl is now watched as much for the new ads as it is for the football.

That’s what makes Microsoft’s ad for the Surface Studio really interesting. For the first time in a long time, a product is being sold on its merits, not on a catchy jingle or a good-looking person wearing scanty clothes.

Here it is below. Watch it, then keep reading.

It’s beautiful, right? Sweeping lights; dark scenes turning into light and colorful spaces; small pieces forming part of an inspirational whole; BOOM! Explosions! Inception noises! In the first 40 seconds, we see something come together that took Microsoft years to make.

It’s elegant in its complexity. Then when the hinge is engaged and the whole machine swoops down to serve the mythical protagonist of the video, that’s when the goosebumps start. New peripherals, new ways to use our tired, old machines: a new era for personal computing. It culminates in an epic symphony of creativity, and appeals to the creator in all of us.

Today I’ve watched this ad about five times, for the sake of it. I didn’t have to write anything about it, I didn’t tweet anything about it. I just watched to watch. I watched someone market something to me because I liked the way it made me feel. And that’s what got me thinking: Microsoft is manipulating me. And it’s manipulating you too.

It’s worth mentioning that profit is not a dirty word. Ads are how companies convince people to buy things, which in turn make them money, which is ultimately why they exist. So when I say we’re being manipulated, I don’t mean it in a scary, Josie and the Pussycats-reboot kind of way. All advertising is manipulation, obviously, but this one is the best I’ve ever seen, and it all comes down to the choice of song.

For those who didn’t have a childhood, it’s called Pure Imagination. Written in 1971 for the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, it was first heard when the titular character, Mr Wonka, takes the cast through the ‘Chocolate Room’: a candy forest with flowing chocolate rivers and waterfalls.