• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, November 6, 2014

As part of my ongoing relationship with marketing, I conducted what the cool science kids might refer to as an “experiment.” In the run-up to Election Day, I kept a log next to the phone to tally the politicians who got all up in my grille via dinner-hour robocalls. The idea was that I wouldn’t support anyone who violated the sanctity of my family time, knowingly or otherwise.

In retrospect, I didn’t think this one all the way through. By strictly adhering to the rules I set, I ended up limiting my voting options to underfunded fascists and wingnuts who believe that a seven-year-old Barack Obama faked the moon landing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Democracy doesn’t work. For what it’s worth, nothing in the Constitution explicitly forbids governance by Astral Council.

It’s thus been a trying week for advertising and me. But even if the election experiment had gone swimmingly (by, say, nudging me towards a candidate who’s pro-basic human decency and anti-patchouli), there’s still little chance I would’ve been able to find much to like about “Microsoft Band: Live Healthier,” a rare Microsoft attempt to do something online that doesn’t involve accidental sabotage of my desktop.

The clip introduces the Microsoft Band, a tech-connected wrist thingamabob that, apparently, will not prevent its users from participating in life. The central premise of the pitch is that the Band will engage users in a way that’s less distracting than smart phones and computers and such.

To hear Microsoft tell it, we’re missing precious moments while “tied to our desks” (person power-types with a ferocity rarely seen outside prison movies), “looking down at our phones” (person noodles with device as child jumps into pool, an experience that is as unrepeatable as Super Bowl XLII) and “plugged in” (couple’s snuggling is corrupted, mechanically and emotionally, by the presence of a glowing phone). “We call them moments because they don’t last, and we don’t know their value until they’re gone… so make the most of every moment,” intones the narrator.

Okay, that sounds reasonable. I’m interested in most-of-every-moment-making. What do I have to do, besides ditch the technology you spent the last 20 seconds running down?

Microsoft’s answer: Buy a wristband that performs many of the functions that those other devices do! See, the Band is smaller and it’s on your wrist. It’s totally different, even with the presence of text messages and calendar reminders and Facebook and Twitter and other procrastination catnip.

We know this is true because of the images that immediately follow our first glimpse of the Band. Smiling good-looking woman! Smiling good-looking kid! And how about that smiling good-looking mom on the beach, who only need glimpse at her wrist to learn that her meeting is canceled and she can focus her full attention on building architecturally unsound sand castles with her smiling good-looking kid? Don’t forget the smiling good-looking graduate getting a U MAKE US PROUD message from the ‘rents and the semi-smiling good-looking woman dictating a memo into her band and the smiling maybe-good-looking guy jumping out a plane.

Microsoft thinks you’re missing moments by overrelying on technology, so it’s going to give you different technology. Okay, that’s a positioning - a silly, splitting-hairs positioning, but a positioning nonetheless. But then the tone shifts towards the end of the clip, as if its creators realized that the original approach asked viewers to take too much of a rhetorical leap of faith.

“You better keep your head up, your eyes forward and your hands free, so you can catch them all [the moments],” intones the narrator. Okay, so The Band is about convenient, ergonomically efficient message-delivery and information-conveyance. Got it. “[The Band is] for people who want to live healthier, be more productive and stay connected with the people and moments that matter most,” he continues. Wait, what? It’s a health and productivity and connectivity tool now? At clip’s end, we go back to “MS Band: leave your phone in your pocket and miss nothing.” Next time, let’s settle on one approach and call it an afternoon, maybe.

Me, I would’ve played up the fitness components. Based on the number of people in “Live Healthier” who are flush with post-exercise glow - not to mention the “Live Healthier” title - the Band is clearly aimed at fitness enthusiasts. The sophistication of its fitness and health tools, however, is anyone’s guess. Stop trying to be all things to all people, Microsoft. This should be stapled onto every circa-2014 marketer’s forehead: Those who go broad, go down.

We’re at the start of a new gadget cycle, one which will showcase wearable technology and all the cool data-retention stuff that comes with it. Which company’s marketers will be the first to make these new products look useful, to trigger a feral “I will mortgage my soul to get one of those” reaction in the buying public? Based on “Live Healthier,” I’m guessing it won’t be Microsoft.