Hey look, its webtoons showing 30 second reenactments of movies featuring bunnies: Angry Alien Productions, Sase and Topsie
You may ask how I found out about such a thing... well, I went to a movie and I saw an ad for "the NEW! MSN Search featuring an everyday person describing the hilarity of JAWS being reenacted by bunnies. The end of the ad tells the movie viewer to go and search for "shark bunnies" on MSN. I thought nothing of this, until I walked out of the theater following my movie (Million Dollar Baby - pretty good flick... a couple of weeks later I even like it more than while I was watching it). There were movie posters as I approached the exit of the theater showing "shark bunnies" @ MSN Search...
This made me want to boycott MSN search for using such a despicable "viral" type of advertising campaign... rather disingenuous I thought (and continue to think). It was rather obvious to anyone that pays attention to trends and advertising. I knew that MSN was going to try to promote their NEW! search engine (which looks like Google and Yahoo mixed... on the rocks), but I was surprised that their big campaign was so obvious. I make a concerted effort to not use a product for which I remember the ad (unless it is a good product--advertisement should never factor into a purchase or use by a cognizant consumer--but I know it still does).
A couple of days later, I found a link to the actual site that had these bunnies reenactments (the link is above... they are actually pretty funny). I can't remember where I saw it, probably on DIGG (actually, it was... I searched and attributed it as such under the word "Digg"). They were on a mildly commercial site, and not linked to MSN whatsoever.
This was the last I thought about this, but I did not use MSN search (like most everyone else that searches... MSN is a joke).
I went and saw a movie with my wife yesterday, and I saw the same ads (I went and saw Robots - pretty animation, lame character design and one of those scripts that relies solely on shallow pop-culture references, cliches and scatological humor as its base for narrative advancement). I thought again about how stupid this advertising campaign was... it was focused on people like me, that enjoy satire and creativity, but simultaneously hate ads. They should have been making shit-jokes for the 4-17 year olds and middle-aged cretins that enjoy Britney Spears jokes and Robin Williams rehashing outtakes for Aladdin (y' know... the audience for Robots) instead of focusing on a demographic that hates to be manipulated and knows why to use a search engine (the reason is not advertising... BTW).
I think this campaign misses the mark... it is too thin to hit the web-savvy (who use google, clusty, yahoo or some other meta-engine) and too far out from the mainstream audience, who are the people that would potentially use the bastard search engine.
I tried searching for "web bunnies" in google... I get nothing fro the first few links. The first google reference to these cartoons is the ninth reference... a person's blog devoted to bunnies(probably not actually devoted to bunnies... but they had a bunny avatar and had a link to "shark bunnies..."), and using MSN Spaces (fucking tool). Here is this person's site. He/She references the MSN site that hosts a WMP encoded version of the flash toon (in lower resolution) and says, "under that big tittle [sic] in white, it says: MSN Search: Shark Bunnies.......ok so now i went there and u guyz have to go there to! ok, ready?" So, obviously I am wrong... some fool has discovered the power of the NEW! MSN Search through the ad and gone to the site, but this person is already using MSN Spaces, and he/she probably is just a person that already used the engine. Google found the toon, but it was not the first response.
So, I decided to try the NEW! MSN Search to see how it can find "shark bunnies" better than google... aren't they searching the same internet? I typed in the key words and watched the responses come up slowly... and then displayed in an unappealing and difficult to read page (I am sure that it looks better in IE). As they said, the first response is "shark bunnies..." but it is an ad for MSNFOUND. It was "found" by "Tad," who just happens to be the everydayish, hipster that is featured in the movie ad. I searched for "Tad" as MSN search prompted me... and he was the first response (with an image next to it that was blocked as being an advertisement... one of those damned ads that look like search results and people click on thinking that they are what they searched for). The link from the original ad has an "email a friend" link. I e-mailed myself (I am my own best friend) and soon received an MSN Search box and info about MSNFOUND in my inbox (ironically, it was delivered to my hotmail spam box...). There is an ad that links to the WMP version (low quality, streaming) of the flash toon, not even attributed to the people who made the webtoon...
I decided that wasn't using the search engine though... lets see how well MSN fares against google in a search for "shark bunnies"... I didn't find it on page one... nor on page 2... MSN stopped giving me results on page 25. I just went through 250 searches and found nothing that linked to these toons... not even the February 27th posting by a person on the MSN blogging software that had the words "shark bunnies" right next to each other!!! It actually stopped giving me results at page 25... even though it said there were 82,000 references for "shark bunnies!" I was willing to look at all of the goddamned pages just to prove a point!
So... the thing I learned from this ad is that MSN sucks at finding anything... even what it is advertising itself as being able to find.
MSN... I am going into my firefox profile and deleting your search engine from the search bar. Piece of shit, lying, useless software...
HOW CAN GOOGLE EVEN FIND IT ON ONE OF YOUR OWN PAGES WHEN YOU CAN'T!!??!??!
Oh yeah... because google rocks (and searches based upon word proximity).
Technorati tags: MSN, lies, google, shark bunnies
Perhaps I will be linked on MSN search eventually for "shark bunnies"... fucking someone has to with all of those people searching MSN for "shark bunnies."
Monday, March 21, 2005
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6 comments:
Excellent piece Mike, and i agree with every word you wrote.
...still no idea whats going on....
Michael, I think you have issues! ;-)
I also saw the ad when I took my kids to Robots (which I thought was a cute and entertaining movie.) I heard them say search for "shark bunnies" but didn't hear the MSN part. (Not that it would matter because I always use Yahoo!) So, many other people probably also missed the MSN part. Just like when Energizer started using the Bunny , people being polled thought it was a Duracell commercial. So they had to start always saying "Energizer Bunny" so people would remember.
I don't think MSN will drum up much business from this ad because I suspect the clueless will always use the search engine provided by their ISP provider. [So all that ad did was get a bunch of bunny sadists (like me) to go look for this shark bunny stuff.] Most people don't even know that they don't have to use the start page that their ISP provider provides. I know because I live with a household full of those clueless people (3 men all over 30). Me and my sons (age 3 & 7) are by far the most literate.
BTW, Yahoo! had the link for the 30 second Jaws/bunnies clip as the first link.
I'm the previous anonymous, again. I saw your comment on another blogger's site and on Yahoo! you were number 3, and the guy's blog you commented on was number 2.
I think you and your better half need some kids. It'll put this right into perspective for you.
On a complete tangent, how often do you get asked what your middle inital is?
Far too often...
It is also impossible to Google myself.
I would say that about 90% of people ask me what my middle initial is... about 3% tell me about Michael Bolton from Office Space, and the other 7% just babble incoherently (much like myself).
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