Everyone is basically in agreement that the advertising market next year is going to suck—even your precious internet ads! So I guess it's appropriate that Microsoft's $300 million ad campaign, which started out with such an ineffective burst of star power, has now been reduced to using videos submitted by you, the idiot consumers. This is all part of a grand strategy by a brilliant ad agency and not at all a harbinger of Microsoft getting its ass handed to it on a national stage, okay?

The end result features folks making mundane, sarcastic or downright bizarre pronouncements, from "I'm a PC and I like the slimming effect of a purple striped shirt" to "I'm a PC and by that I don't mean politically correct."... So are the people uploading pictures and videos actually real PC users, or are they merely looking for 15 seconds of fame? For its part, Microsoft doesn't really care.

You know what Microsoft's problem is here? They tried to make an entire ad campaign that's essentially a response to all the needling they've taken from Apple and god damn Justin Long over the years. But Apple went ahead and continued to needle Microsoft about its ad campaign, placing the onus on Microsoft to actually win the argument through some grand gesture. Instead, they believe they can win simply by placing every PC owner in the world in a television ad, one by one. Which doesn't work when none of them are attractive. [Ad Age]