Heads up: The Windorphins are coming

A sidenote to eBay’s earnings call this afternoon was the announcement – well, warning is more like it – that eBay is about to start turning up the volume on its dreadful “windorphins” ad campaign.

This was surely the darkest news to emerge from a conference call that sent eBay’s stock lower. When eBay unveiled the new campaign last month, I thought “windorphins” was some kind of marketing synergy with Microsoft Windows. No, it was just eBay being “fun”. “It’s that fun, great, euphoric feeling you get when you win on eBay,” Meg Whitman said today.

And yet it was more nausea than euphoria that I felt going to windorphins.com (a domain that eBay actually had to strongarm a journalist into giving up). It’s peppered with video ads that all made me cringe and colorful blobs with blinking eyes, which I guess windorphins are supposed look like. You can even design your own windorph avatar. (Caution: If you try this, do not click on the “jazz hands” tab. It may induce thoughts of suicide.)

Most people found the last eBay campaign – where people fetishize the oversize yet lower-cap letters “i” and “t” – perplexing and smug. Before that, there were campaigns like the Nike-ish “do it eBay” and the Hallmark-ish “the power of us” – harmless enough but it apparently moved no one. (Actually, some of the oldies are actually pretty good.)

It’s been said often enough that traditional advertisers have taken forever to wake up to the realities of the Internet. So why is it that the same is true for Internet companies attempting to advertise through traditional venues. With notable exceptions – a few Super Bowl spots from employment sites, pretty much anything from Apple – offline campaigns from tech-savvy companies are rank. Does anyone miss the pets.com sock puppet?

Not long ago, eBay was a cultural force to be reckoned with – a new worldwide lifestyle for the digital age. Now it’s message is being reduced to brightly colored, blinking blobs. Surely a $7 billion company can afford to create a better marketing message than that.

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