So a bunch of Microsoft employees turned up unannounced outside the Apple Store on New York’s 5^th Avenue earlier this week to sing to the opposing tech giant about peace on Earth so that we can watch it on TV. The song, “Let There Be Peace,” sung by Microsoft employees and a local youth choir, could be taken two ways, depending on your level of cynicism. It’s either a complex gesture of goodwill, or a piece of trite marketing worthy of invoking the epoch-timely idiom, “jumping the shark.”

These should be happy days for Microsoft, a company that seems to be climbing the slippery scale of the hardware market (so many of my friends are buying Surface tablets this Christmas, according to my Facebook feed anyway) and has a new OS that has so far, for the most part, been chimed about. Still, Microsoft has a way to go in persuading people away from its much cooler contender, Apple. Microsoft has new hardware products to rival Apple’s similar products, but symbolically, a la advertising, on TV, everywhere, Apple wins hands down.

So Microsoft wants peace with Apple. I hate saying I hate to be cynical, so I won’t say it. I am cynical, always, at least as far as goodwill emotional advertising is concerned. I once asked a CEO I worked for if our company’s corporate responsibility was not just good marketing; he gave me a concerned look and I lasted about one more month in my managerial position. Morality and big money-making, ethical benchmarks and the bottom line; how shall the twain meet? If you do something ostensibly good, that’s also good for you, and your employees, then surely it’s good all round. It’s just that some of the chicanery employed within the tenets of cultural capitalism seems a bit phony. If the goodwill message is not sincere, is it still good?

Was peace on Earth and serenading your best rival sincere? Microsoft has as many backers as it does detractors concerning its ode to tech love. Forbes wrote a caustic opinion peace, I mean piece, calling Microsoft’s holiday mellifluousness “thinly veiled aggression. A trump card from the wrong suit.” What does peace with Apple actually mean? Aren’t both companies going to fight tooth and nail this Christmas to get as many iPads and Surface hybrids as they can under the family Christmas tree? Isn’t that what Christmas is all about, at least where business is concerned?

A TV commercial in Thailand went viral a couple of years ago for its brilliant advertising subterfuge, which led to an online hands-around-the-world. The tear-jerking ad that told us “giving is best” was the work of CP corporation, owned by the richest man in Thailand. Of course it was perfect; they probably have the best people in the country figuring out how to get into our easy hearts. Still, skepticism toward CP perhaps not being entirely sincere about its making things right was met mostly with contempt by some of the 20 million people that saw the ad. “My tears are pouring like a river,” was the main gist in the YouTube comments thread. The message was good, but was it heartfelt as many people said it was? Undoubtedly, it was made to make money and had its sights only set on the bottom line. It’s how you should advertise these days if you want to succeed, at least until folks grow weary of it.

“If they were rolling out a new Microsoft Office suite that worked harmoniously with Apple’s operating system, I’d join their joyous singing. Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be case,” said a writer at Ideasicle writing about Redmond’s Christmas hit. The web and its critics for the most part are a little skeptical about peace to the world, and Apple; a “song-bomb” that TechCrunch feels is less a of piece of goodwill than it is a “holiday rumble.” CNET, however, was less cynical, calling the move an “utter delight.”

Some critics have called it heartwarming, and others have laughed at that kind of statement. Personally, I am completely unmoved; it means nothing to me. If you’ve studied, or worked, in advertising or marketing you know this is just what has to be done, and the less the public have bottom lines in their minds the better. The problem is that the vast majority of us do want peace on Earth and so agree with the sentiments of the song. It’s just that when peace is propagated via a TV commercial it’s hard to believe that it’s the real thing — even if Microsoft spent good money making that commercial with peace on Earth in mind.

It’s hard to find where to draw the line when it comes to emotional advertising, because surely some good is better than no good? Or is it? I’m not quite sure. Peace be with you, anyway.

Photo credit: Quinn Dombrowski via Flickr