Is there anything more edifying than a stuffy Year 12 prefect picking on the whizz-kid from Year 9 who has just made the firsts chess team? If UnderCurrent’s metaphorical rhetorical is making you yawn, then you could be placed in a coma by Microsoft’s latest bizarre attempt to connect with the kids and dissuade them from purchasing a fun-though-essentially-pointless Chromebook.
The creative types in Seattle have engaged the otherwise entertaining Rick and the Old Man from the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas, stars of the popular reality show Pawn Stars, to launch ‘Scroogled’, a website that attempts to communicate the pointlessness of a Chromebook.
Aside from the terrible name, which UnderCurrent understands is supposed to be a portmanteau of ‘screw’ and ‘Google’, rather than a reference to scrooge-like character Ebenezer Scrooge (or maybe it’s both?), nothing reeks of desperation more than reality TV stars on a multicoloured microsite explaining to the stereotypically hapless woman that a rival’s product is a paperweight because it doesn’t ship with Microsoft Outlook:
Microsoft might be popular with a TV personality that goes by the moniker ‘Old Man’ but in a sign of where it sits with the kids, after seven years and 10,440 posts, this is the first time we’ve embedded a Bing Video into a story…
UPDATE: It has been brought to UnderCurrent’s attention that Microsoft is attempting to build a whole new merch empire out of ‘Scroogled’ – once again, not sure that name is going to take of – and is currently selling t-shirts, mugs and hoodies carrying several probing (or ‘pro-Bing’) accusations:
