BrandsAmongMany

Over the weekend I received an email from Todd Bishop, co-founder and writer of TechFlash, regarding a post I wrote a while back about the Life Takes Vista campaign. While I hadn’t given the campaign much thought since, Todd appears to have taken quite an interest in it. In fact, he’s put the time into revealing exactly who’s behind the curious campaign. And it’s quite a story…

In short, the campaign was NOT created by rogue Crispin agents (as yours truly thought was a distinct possibility), but rather by one Shmuel “Shmuly” Tennenhaus. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of him either, but apparently he’s “making a name for himself” - guess I can’t knock him too much though since I haven’t been written up in the NYT. Well, Microsoft was none too humored; they’ve served Shmuly a cease-and-desist order citing copyright infringement of the M$ logo. The letter now resides on the Life Takes Vista site if you want to give it a read. Personally, I can’t say I’ll miss the campaign much…

Thanks for the heads-up Todd!

So yesterday morning I got a friendly email from a reader named Lornie:

Hi Danny,
Have you seen this yet? not sure what to make of it….
http://lifetakesvista.com/
Lornie

At first glance, of course, it looks like any other email I get from various PR people looking to promote the newest campaign by agency X or company Y, most of which I ignore (I’m not usually too interested in playing shill for some company’s new TV campaign). The only thing that led me to look into this one a little further was the fact that Lornie’s email didn’t come from a PR company account and didn’t name agency X or company Y. Well, that and the fact that I actually hadn’t seen the Life Takes Vista effort yet.

So after taking a quick look at the Life Takes Vista site, my immediate question to Lornie was…

What’s your connection to the campaign?

To which she responded:

zero. i dont work for msft. (actually unemployed at the moment) not sure if its from msft because i searched the web and didnt see anything on this…or theyre trying to be stealthy!

At first I took her answer at face value. But, in the midst of looking further into the campaign to ready a post, I stumbled onto a couple of other blogs who heard from a “loyal fan”, Lornie:

jkOnTheRun
James Kendrick’s Twitter
The Ranch
Flickr

Of course, these aren’t the only blogs talking about the effort. There’s still the lingering question of who the heck is responsible for this campaign (blatant rip-off?). It doesn’t appear to be an official Microsoft effort. In fact, there’s discussion around that question in a couple of places:

AdRants
CrunchGear

Hrm. As CrunchGear points out, this feels either like a very smart effort by a couple of ad students to get themselves noticed (feels like a reach to me) or an effort by a couple of bored Crispin employees who didn’t get the idea through during the original effort. A little further digging reveals that the Life Take Vista site is being hosted by a company in Denver under anonymous administration - only a stone’s throw from Boulder…

Suddenly Lornie seems less like a friendly reader and more like a PR agent that she seemed like to begin with. Lornie, I’ll be the first to offer my most sincere apologies if I’m wrong - we appreciate a tip as much as the next guy - but this one just feels dirty. A search for the email address the tip was sent from reveals nothing, which would be rather unusual given how many forums, websites, etc. most digitally savvy ad students are signed up for. And a search for Lornie’s full name also reveals nothing…no Facebook profile, no LinkedIn account, no personal website…nothing.

So short answer…I’m not sold. This feels like nothing more than a covert, subversive attempt to get eyeballs on a rip-off campaign. Which it seems to have accomplished - along with building a wealth of negative brand equity. Kudos!