Microsoft News Tracker

Silly me! I have always treated Microsoft’s latest corporate marketing slogan, “people-ready,” as merely another turgid catch phrase coined by an inept corporate marketing crew that provides an occasional humorous moment. Little did I know that they were really, really serious about it and that they reached deep into the piggy bank to get otherwise sensible people to extol its virtues as a bromide.

To wit: Microsoft pays star writers to recite slogan:

But there are limits to journalistic endorsements, and Federated Media just crossed them.

John Battelle’s ad network has roped in some of its star writers to an ad campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “people-ready” catchphrase. In the ads, and the companion site built by Federated Media, Michael Arrington explains how his Techcrunch site became “people-ready“. “When is a business people ready?” asks Gigaom’s Om Malik. “The minute you decide to strike out on your own…” Other writers who’ve been paid to repeat Microsoft’s slogan include Paul Kedrosky and Matt Marshall of Venture Beat, as well as Fred Wilson, the blogger-investor.

Check out the site for yourself and note that the latest spelling of the slogan has lost the original hyphen. That probably entailed a lot of sleepless nights by the creative team and yet many of the writers didn’t get the message. Oh, the horror! Perhaps it would have helped if they had gotten tattoos.