Microsoft's anti-viral

Possibly the worst advert ever made?

I first watched the video when Rhodri Marsden linked to it on his Independent blog. He wrote: “Brace yourself, ladies and gentlemen; if you make it through to the end, you are a more tolerant human than I. Of course, now I’m regretting linking to the damn thing and pointing out how abysmal it is, because that’s exactly what they wanted me to do.”

To spare you sitting through it, it’s for a Microsoft product called Songsmith which, it is claimed, helps the user to write songs. The user sings into it and Songsmith adds a backing track eerily reminiscent of a 1980s Casio keyboard. That seems to be all it does. As one commenter on Rhodri’s blog puts it, “Everyone can be John Shuttleworth now.”

I started to watch the advert, groaned, couldn’t bear it any longer, stopped and went away. Later I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing, so I switched on my computer and watched it properly. Then I made my husband watch it. Then I forwarded it to everybody in my immediate family and we all began an email conversation about it: “What's more annoying, the concept, the little girl or the MAN!!!!!!!!”, “I couldn’t bear it”, “I’m in shock”.

I can't seem to stop analysing its awfulness, either. About thirty seconds in, a dad tells his daughter: "I've never heard you sing." This bothered me on many levels: how come he's never heard her sing, given that a) he's her father, b) she's at least eleven years old and c) her sub-Broadway honk says "stage school" louder than legwarmers ever could?

The line jumped out at me because it's unnatural English as well as being incredibly unlikely. Even if the dad really had never heard his daughter sing before, a native speaker of American English would say "I've never heard you sing before". Idiom has been sacrified to shoehorn the lyrics into the plodding tune.

So I'm overanalysing this terrible advert, forwarding it to my friends and blogging about it. How many others are doing the same? Judging by the number of people who've watched the clip on YouTube, the answer to my question is "a lot". In other words, Microsoft have succeeded in creating a buzz around their latest product, simply by making an advert so bad that everybody wants to share the pain with their friends. This is the anti-viral: a clip that everybody wishes they'd never seen, but can't resist forwarding on.

Before the internet was invented, the ultimate anti-viral was a chain letter threatening dire consequences for "breaking the chain". The consequences had to be terrible (and luridly described) to scare you into bothering with photocopiers and postboxes. Now, of course, sharing content is a lot easier and faster. This video is worth watching for a fascinating explanation of why both cream and scum rise to the top of the YouTube ratings.