Last night, I was watching Demetri Martin’s latest standup special on Comedy Central and during every commercial break we were shown a commercial for an organization calling themselves The Institute for Advanced Personhood. This is another piece of viral marketing from Microsoft. This time it’s for their latest operating system, Windows Vista. It seems very similar to Halo 2’s I Love Bees campaign.

The commercials were odd. The founder of the IAP.org, Dr. Woodrow Lovett, seemed to be a 60’s hippy all grown up. He seemed to be that nice grandfather that was to skinny to play Santa. He basically talked about be organized - but in a non-sales-pitch kind of way. I’m sure the commercials will be on YouTube soon.

Visit the IAP’s website and you can watch orientation videos and take a self actualization test (pass or fail, you get nothing - at one point, I got this message: “Please leave this site immediately”).

There is a link that takes you to Clearification.com. The three of the four commercials during the special promoted this site. It seems to be a site focusing Demetri Martin more then Vista - although the Vista logo and link are present in the lower left corner throughout the site.

It’s clever marketing, obviously aimed at the young and hip. It’s not as convoluted and cryptic as Microsoft’s other viral campaigns: ilovebees.com, ourcolony.net or origenxbox360.com. It’s definitely more direct. Essentially, Microsoft seems to be sponsoring Demetri’s tour and the site was created so you can get more comedy content and create buzz about Vista. It seems to need all of the help it can get . . .