I was Stumbling through videos recently as I’m apt to do and I came across something quite spectacular. There’s a lot of interesting fodder uploaded to the various video networks, demanding a spectrum of emotional reaction but the video below REALLY caught my attention. It could be the kid in me but I thought this was spectacular on a creative, inventive, educational and ingeniously marketed level.

The Museum of Natural History in Los Angles has hired the help of puppet fabricators and the museum’s own paleontologists to recreate a 14-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex and a nine-foot Triceratops to walk the halls of the museum. In this video you can see how the kids are interacting with the T-Rex. They are completely blown away, exhibiting reactions of amazement and in some instances fear.

Museums are always trying to come up with new and interesting ways to bring people in and this would be as close to the Jurassic Park hysteria as one could get. Kids absolutely love this kind of stuff and the parents are going to be led by the incessant pleading of the children to “go see the dinosaurs”.

I don’t know if the museum’s marketing department was responsible for recording and uploading videos of the dinosaurs in action but it was a fantastic idea. I’ve found several different videos of the dinosaurs on YouTube, MySpace, and Vimeo so it looks like they’re getting great coverage. The video with the most views is the one I’ve pasted here.

Kudos to the Museum of Natural History in Los Angles. I don’t know what the production cost of the dino-suits and puppeteers were but I would guess that the ROI was entirely worth it. Good work!

Many of us have heard that Microsoft is dumping Jerry Seinfeld from their recent ad campaign. Apparently this strategy was always set to play out and Microsoft announced it will move into “phase two” of its campaign on Thursday. Seinfeld will bow out to a menagerie of personalities like author Deepak Chopra, actress Eva Longoria and musician Pharrell Williams.

So can anyone tell me what they’re trying to achieve here? I’ve read that Microsoft is attempting to reach the average user but IMHO these ads are just way to awkward to reach anyone. I mean, they definitely made you stop and watch but it was entirely due to the unusual pairing of Gates and Seinfeld and the fact that Gates was in a commercial at all. The campaign cost Microsoft $300 million to produce and Jerry received $10 million of that. So far it’s probably the shiniest turd I’ve ever seen.

Microsoft, I know you’re having a hard time trying to reach the Apple demographic but you’re not going to win them over when you use a celebrity that was on a sitcom that ended over 10 years ago. I personally loved Seinfeld and who didn’t? But you have to get a bit more up-to-speed with the times and the personalities that reflect that. You tried advertising on Digg which seemed like a good strategy since the Digg demo is loaded with Apple fans but I guess that wasn’t enough or maybe it just didn’t work.

Here’s the thing…as a social media and search marketing expert I know you can promote a piece of content to the point of exhaustion without much traffic in return. The reason being is that if the content isn’t good, controversial, funny, entertaining, or unusual enough then you’re not going to get anywhere, no matter how much money you spend. So if your content is Vista which is a buggy resource hog, or it entails spending lots of time and money turning photo albums into big-ass interactive tables, or riding the ipod’s coattails with the uncool Zune… if the content blows, you’re not going to get anywhere no matter how much money you spend on promotion. Start making good and innovative products like you did 23 years ago and the people will follow. Photosynth for example, is badass…make more stuff like this and then integrate it into mobile applications. You might want to improve on a mobile OS however (think bigger screen) if you’re going to fight both Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.

So save those ad dollars and put it into R&D because even though we all love Jerry, he’s not going to make us want to go out and buy Microsoft products. You’re going to end up spending a lot of time and money chasing the tails of the innovators when you should be making revolutionary products like you did…23 years ago.