Microsoft and Basketball

Is it possible that Microsoft is trying to get into the spirit of March Madness with the ad above? Maybe I don’t have as good of a grasp on what quality advertising is, as I once thought. Why is the illustration above relevant to the product being advertised by the Redmond company? For those of you who don’t know, Microsoft Visual Studio is used for writing programs. How does the copy in the ad above make the connection related to monsters and basketball?

Also, what does the illustration represent? Do the monsters represent viruses? My other issue is who exactly is the target audience for this particular print ad? By the way the ad was taken from Information Week. How does this ad promote Visual Studio to the readers of the magazine? I would think that the ad seemed rather stupid to the magazine’s target audience.

I am not quite sure who the ad agency behind the creative is and I know that Crispin Porter + Bogusky does quite a bit of the Microsoft creative. But I highly doubt they did the print advertisement above. They seem to be a class above the work shown here.

Best,
A.B.