I’ve found that one of the biggest mistakes of technical marketers is to assume that your audience know what the hell you’re talking about. The latest Microsoft commercial is a great example of terrible marketing. In “To the Cloud”, the lady is going to the cloud to fix her issues of her family not being still and taking a family photo. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t really explain what the cloud has anything to do with this nor why it’s “To the Cloud”.
Obviously, for those in the know-how and geekdom, this is a pretty simple task of dissection. But this isn’t like an IBM commercial where it’s targeted at business people. No, this is something targeted at your normal everyday Joe Schmoe that doesn’t really care one way or another if your application is in the “cloud” or not. I mean, in all honesty, you just want things to work, and work well. Do you care whether or not it works in the cloud? Of course not. It’s like me trying to explain the differences between CDMA and GSM and the difference in call quality based on technological differences to my mother. If she’s going to buy a cell phone, she cares about the way it looks and how cool it is instead of what the infrastructure it sits on.
Same thing here. Thus, that Microsoft ad turns out to be a total cheese to those that know, and totally misses the ball with those that don’t. Always make sure that you understand your audience before you play technical keywords at them.