People Ready Wins Big
There’s a lot of drama going down about some FM advertising campaign from Microsoft called ‘People Ready‘. Basically what happened is a bunch of well known bloggers talked about how their businesses became people ready and Microsoft took those quotes, put them on banner ads, and is now running those ads on those same blogs. Apparently this has upset some folks.
I don’t want to get involved in the ethics behind this as there are already plenty of valid arguments from both sides being made. But while the blogosphere bitches back and forth like a couple of newlyweds, Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank. This campaign has already created more mindshare, discussion and buzz then they ever could of hoped for.
The only real winner here is Microsoft. This is also a huge opportunity for them to take this campaign to the next level. Are they smart enough to figure it out and take the ball and run with it?
Cameron Olthuis is the Founder of
It will be interesting how all of this plays out, especially with people taking sides. Jason Calacanis mentioned that it was “a fiasco” but I never heard what he really thinks about it.
I personally am going to give it a little bit more time; Microsoft might be the winner here, but if there’s a huge backlash against it by bloggers than it could be a publicity nightmare for them. Let’s see how it all plays out.
Bill, from what I’ve seen all the backlash has been towards the bloggers who accepted and FM. I haven’t really seen that much negative press toward MS for this.
I sure as hell had no idea what People Ready was before this and I’m guessing neither did most people.
Sounds like I need to take another look at People Ready.