20Feb 08
EDS parachutes to safety as your systems crash
Posted by Munir Kotadia @ 15:08 17 comments
Sometimes companies create advertising campaigns that look and sound fantastic but on closer inspection are a real embarrassment -- and tech companies are often the worst offenders.
While stumbling through some videos, I came across this advert by EDS. It is really very good in so many ways -- but bad in so many more.
It's about EDS figuratively building an aeroplane while it's still in the air. It shows a jumbo jet high in the sky, with tool-wielding engineers strapped onto its fuselage riveting metal plates together while hanging on for dear life.
Inside the airplane, which has more holes in its body than a piercing fanatic, stewardesses are unsuccessfully attempting to serve refreshments and snacks to passengers, who -- because of the high winds bucketing through the plane's holey fuselage -- are sitting uncomfortably, repeatedly hit in the face with the errant food.
The advert finishes with a message: "In a sense, this is what we do. We build your digital business. Even while you're up and running."
I can see what EDS is trying convey but as a CIO, would you really want your business run this way -- with employees being smacked in the face with hot beverages and runaway napkins while they are trying to work? Would you want your staff to be inches away from death every time they go to the photocopier?
However, what really concerned me (and made me laugh) was that at the end of the commercial, EDS employees left the airplane by parachute -- and they were the only people armed with such a luxury.
What about the poor passengers, flying in a half built plane with no means of escape?
Does that mean if something were to go wrong with the airplane (oops, I mean digital business) -- would EDS be there in an emergency to fix up the problems and help the company stay afloat (I mean in the air)? Does EDS have support planes (which we would hope are not half built) to rescue the passengers?
If I didn't know better, I would think that in an emergency, EDS would safely slip away while its customers crash and burn.
Anyone want to tell me different?
6%
3%
I'll tell you what happened. You read way too much into this ad.
It's an ad. It's packed to the brim with bull-poop. That's what ads are, that's what they do.
Sweet Jiminy Cricket, Microsoft's buying Yahoo, Blu-Ray just won the format war, DoubleTwist just ended DRM in music (perhaps)...
But no, write an article about your overly literal interpretation of an ad.
Wow. True professional.