Posts tagged internet explorer

Sometimes, there is a product or brand which you have completely given up on. They are dead to you, with no hope of ever getting you back. Quite frankly, they could cease to exist and your world would not change one iota.

And then sometimes, an advert crops up which suddenly throws all that aside, and pulls you back in again!

The advert in question, is here:

This ad makes me excited. By a web browser. I already have several web browsers, at no cost, and they pretty much all do everything I expect from them, and yet I find myself excited by the prospect of a new one. Not just that, but it’s Internet Explorer. The IE brand has been so damaged over the past decade by virus attacks, and the arrival of safe and sleek alternatives like Safari, Firefox and Chrome, that it has looked completely dead in the water. Windows 7 went down well, but the accompanying Internet Explorer 8 did nothing to persuade people not to abandon a browser which was once King of the Nerds.

But this advert has somehow made me forget all those terrible past experiences using IE, and actually got me excited about the brand again. Now that is good advertising!

What’s the secret then? There’s nothing subtle here; IE have come rushing out like a bull, tackling their critics (most people) head on, with bold claims about how their product has developed out of the shadow of past editions, and is back in front of its rivals again. Time will tell how true this is, but they have at the very least created an emotional response, and got people questioning their own experiences, thinking about whether this new IE is right for them, which is a great success. And if I may be allowed to get a bit Zane Lowe for a moment, a lot of that is down to the music by Alex Clare - who I have been a big fan of for the past 12 months - and whose track ‘Too Close’ forces those feelings IE want you to experience inside your brain, and make you want to use it again. Nice work.