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This year we’ll be talking a lot about mobile, and personally I’m excited about all of the innovative advertising solutions we’ll deliver for our clients via the mobile channel over the course of the next 12 months. In anticipation, I took a look back on some previous campaigns we’ve driven that effectively integrated mobile platforms and Intel – ‘The Chase’ – stands out to me as a fantastic example.

Intel wanted to launch a digital campaign that would increase its brand awareness and promote the incredible power of its new Core i5 processors. We can’t see these processors, since they are embedded in our PCs, but they are in fact the backbone of these remarkable machines that we use everyday. The question was: how could Intel make these processors, which seem unfamiliar or even boring, come to life and really convey to the average consumer the possibilities they create? How do you build excitement around something that’s, well, invisible?
The solution: immersing the consumer in an action-packed chase across PC programmes. A heroine outwitting two thugs trailing her through YouTube, Facebook, and Microsoft Office, all the while demonstrating the amazing things Intel’s processor lets us do on our computers. The two-minute video was a big hit and was named an ‘Ad Worth Spreading’ by TED that you can watch here.

Following on the success of the video, Intel partnered with Microsoft Advertising to take elements of its creative and continue ‘The Chase’ on a global scale across Microsoft platforms–spanning mobile, web and Xbox Live, and covering the UK, Germany, France, Russia, Poland and Turkey. To make this phase of the campaign a truly engaging experience, we kicked off with a 24 hour bespoke HPTO across MSN sites, created 1-on-1 games on Windows Live Messenger, and offered Intel theme packs for Xbox Live Spotlight users. And importantly, we extended ‘The Chase’ experience to handheld devices with the use of expandable rich media.

The campaign was a great success for Intel. Research conducted by Dynamic Logic across the UK, Germany and Russia showed uplifts in the campaign association for the brand across all markets, with the highest spike seen in Russia. The campaign also boosted Intel Core i5 processor awareness, particularly amongst the Windows Live Messenger audience, which saw a 21 per cent increase. We were able to help Intel, a giant company that makes products people don’t necessarily touch or see, bring its brand story to life.
By creating a branded experience with rich, interactive content across multiple markets and screens, we really demonstrated what Microsoft Advertising’s unique offering is all about. In a way, today’s consumer is like our heroine jumping effortlessly from screen to screen–our task as digital advertisers is to engage them holistically and tell a good story in the process.

David Pugh-Jones, Brand Strategist, Microsoft Advertising

Customers love when businesses have printed materials to share. Whether you are a real estate agent or flower shop owner, the power of a good brochure that delivers your message with vivid visual impact cannot be overestimated. A marketing brochure can boost your sales efforts instantly, and by creating those materials in-house, you can save both time and money.

Why create a brochure in-house?

There are some great benefits for small businesses that print materials in-house. Not only does using high-quality printers like OfficeJets make it easy to save big with in-house marketing materials, but more control can be used when customizing content. Businesses can take extra care in developing a brochure that builds loyalty, understanding and potentially reaches new audiences.

If you’re not too sure about developing a brochure for your audience without a design professional, here are a few tips to develop a clear, focused message that will visually appeal to you target readers:

· Study your audience: Understand who your target reader is and craft a message that reflects their demographic, likes, dislikes and individual category, whether that is stay-at-home moms or Chicago baseball fans.

· Plan your message: Use insights from your customers, employees, and salespeople to create a message that is clear, concise and gives a “call to action” for the readers.

· Compile your artwork: Pictures and illustrations are almost always the first thing readers look at in brochures, so make sure all visuals reflect your business’ culture and are consistent with the theme of the content. Digital cameras can be used to take professional-looking shots and sites like Wylio.com have free images for download.

With your established brochure content in place, many websites and types of software like Adobe InDesign offer professional-looking brochure templates that you can download, easily personalize, and then print yourself. Here are tips when using brochure templates:

· Editing headlines and copy: An easy way to catch typos when you’re done adding text is to read the text and headlines out loud. Ask someone else to read it too.

· Communicate with color: Experiment with color by changing them to match the message of your business. It’s best to limit the number of colors to two or three, and choose complimentary colors that go with the hue and lightness of your art.

· Add photos and artwork: Before adding your artwork to the brochure template, remember to touch up, crop or improve your images using your favorite photo- or imaging-editing software before inserting the image into the template.

· Save your work: Brochure files can be quite large once you have added your image files. If you make several brochures to target different audiences, consider making a backup on CD to save your hard drive space. Also, be sure to save your document every few minutes to prevent disasters in the event the computer crashes or the power suddenly goes out.

· Choose the right paper: Spend time going over your paper options to really bring your brochure to life.

· Check brochure on paper: Producing a “proof” on plain paper first, allows you to check your picture placement and color. It also helps you practice your two-sided printing directions and saves the valuable specialty paper you’ll use for the final brochure. Here are more guidelines for flawless prints:

o Use plain paper and draft mode for your proof copy.

o Follow Microsoft Word directions for two-sided printing.

o Try marking the top of the paper before your print, to help you visualize how both sides of paper flow through the printer.

o Have someone proof again.

o Use highest-quality setting when printing your final brochures.

o To avoid ink smears, set the pages aside to dry completely in between printing on the front and back.

o To extend the physical life of your brochures, store them in a dark, dry place.

With the above tools, technology and tips, any business can create professional and impactful brochures to increase sales, customers and credibility. For more information about HP’s print offerings, you can visit here.

It is our priority to provide developers around the globe an opportunity to make money using the Microsoft Advertising Solution and today we are happy to announce we are expanding our solution into seven new countries on February 1, 2012: Denmark, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Mexico, Sweden, and Switzerland. Now, developers from nineteen countries (full list below) can make money by taking advantage of Microsoft’s Advertising solution for mobile developers.

Our solution includes ad controls that are built right into the Windows Phone SDK; combined with pubCenter’s self-serve sign-up, reporting and automated payouts, we ensure a seamless experience. After your app goes live in the marketplace and users start to use it, you can watch your revenue grow.

Developers will need to provide account information into pubCenter required for payment. Once advertising revenue reaches the minimum amount required for payout (see table below), and the developer has completed the steps necessary for payment, Microsoft will start sending money their way.

The Microsoft Advertising solution for Windows Phone apps has been shown to make more money for developers than other solutions in the market… up to 71% more in a recent study!

Here are three easy steps to get started:

Have questions? Check out the Microsoft Advertising Forum. To send us feedback and have your voice heard, please contact psupport@microsoft.com (English only)

Thank you from Microsoft Advertising.

Avi Sagiv

While scrolling through my Facebook feed last night, I ran across a shared link from a friend highlighting a Technorati article by Andrew Froehlich, Bing: The New King of Search .* Needless to say, I felt compelled to click through… having watched the evolution of Bing since arriving here at Microsoft, I have to say without any bias whatsoever that the decision engine has come a long way. It’s old news now, but I clearly remember this article from ZDNet.com stood out to me when I ran…(read more)

Every once in a while I do wonder if I shouldn’t be doing something a little bit more, well useful with my life. Don’t you? Perhaps I should get my driving license, buy a race car and get on with it but seriously: this isn’t midlife crisis just yet. The good intentions are all there but the time isn’t, not now anyway. That’s why it’s so nice to see that Bing (the search engine you should all be advertising on to achieve an amazing ROI with our help) has been lending its homepage to small charities this week enabling them to tell their story to Bing’s users.

Every Last Friday of the Month Bing will Feature a Charity of Your Choice

In Britain there are more than 187,000 registered charities – all worthy to get some attention and the chance to tell their story. Each day this week Bing has been highlighting a charity as part of a long-term campaign in which the British public will be able to nominate the charities they would like to see featured on the homepage on the final Friday of each month via www.bing.com/HelpYourBritain. The Bing hotspots providing background information about the cause.

The last few days you’ve been able to learn more about :

• Magic Breakfast: Delivers free, healthy breakfast foods to UK primary schools where more than 50% of pupils qualify for free school meals.
• Lifelites: Started out as a pilot project in 1999 with the idea of providing education and entertainment technology for children in hospices currently serving around 5,000 children and their families in England, Wales and Scotland.
• All Dogs Matter: A voluntary dog rescue based in London. It is focused on rescuing and re-homing each dog it takes into care, ensuring that it will be safe and loved for the rest of its life.

Today’s yellow speech bubbles represent User Voice, an organization founded in 2009 by Mark Johnson, an ex-offender whose aim was to foster dialogue between those who have experience of the criminal justice system and the system itself to bring about its reform and reduce offending rates. Tomorrow you’ll find we draw attention to Life Cycle UK ; a Bristol-based organization that aims to inspire people and equip them with the skills, the knowledge and the confidence to make cycling part of their everyday lives.

What could you do?

Your advertising campaign can wait for a minute. Look at the Bing homepage, have a look at the charities on the homepage. You can also nominate a charity close to your heart to feature on our homepage on the last Friday of the month at www.bing.com/HelpYourBritain. It won’t only help deserving charities – it will also make you feel very useful and it won’t take much time at all!

It might be cold outside, but it’s sizzling in here! Let me share our best digital storytelling from the last few months.

Cindy Lee, Go-To-Market Lead, Microsoft Advertising Asia

UK Finance Trends and Digital Opportunities

With consumer confidence remaining at all-time lows, and negative perceptions of the high street banks, (45%* feel banks have lost touch with their customers) finance brands in the UK are under increasing pressure to rebuild relationships with the public. 

Although times are hard, there is a real opportunity to engage with an audience who sees little differentiation in this marketplace (62%* agree that “most high street banks are pretty much the same as each other).

Finance brands need to rebuild brand confidence and create greater client engagement opportunities (43% of 16-24 year olds want to build a relationship with their bank*)

With consumers increasingly interested in their finances, we know that the internet provides them with a wealth of information. 69% of all adults say that the internet is the first place they look when they seek financial information. 

Finance brands should consider the following digital opportunities to help rebuild brands and re-engage with their consumers:

1. Brand building with creative Channel Takeovers: To build brands you need to reach large audiences and with the MSN UK homepage having almost 19 million visitors per month (44% of the total Internet population**) you can do just that in a cost effective way. In two months more people visit the MSN Homepage than fly out of Gatwick Airport in a year!

Gone are the days of the humble banner ad format. MSN UK has recently launched several new creative ad formats including the award winning Filmstrip, a brilliant format that encourages deep levels of engagement in a very intuitive style with 5 separate panels that the user can scroll through to explore all different types of content.

The billboard, a huge canvas that sits as not only the largest image on the MSN homepage but also the first image a user will see, sitting above the editorial content, just below our site navigation bar, offering a perfect extension of any large format offline campaigns, in particular outdoor and press.

The 3D Cube combines the impact of a rich media homepage takeover with heightened engagement and interactivity through a user-initiated experience. Six panels showcasing a range of rich media content ensure that the 3D Cube combines a high-impact brand showcase with the opportunity for in-depth messaging.

Read more on new MSN UK ad formats

2. Creative Engagement: To drive client engagement you need truly creative solutions – campaigns with high dwell time saw an average of 69% improvement in campaign effectiveness. We’ve seen users spend more than double the minutes on MSN due to the stickiness of its editorial and personalized social content.

On example is the MSN “Travel Tip Off” with Capital One Ezine. 

3. Targeted Engagement. We have access to one of the biggest pools of data in the market, with Windows Live ID, search data, user behaviour across our portal and gaming information from our Xbox audience. We can combine that with data from Clients – on site visits to aid re-messaging, through to database information to help target engaged customers already down the purchase funnel. Finally we work with 3^rd party providers to layer offline data about consumers and their behaviours to drive targeting at scale.

4. New Innovations: Consumers are in control and taking for granted features like ‘live pause’, ‘multi-touch’, and ‘carrying over personalisation to other devices’. Microsoft’s consumer vision is to enable this world through ‘3 Screens and the Cloud’. The cloud is where you live your digital life: communicate with each other, consume content, shop, search, play. We want to be the leader provider of these services. We also want to help tie them together. Single ID, remember your settings, all your social media status/updates in one place. We want to help you access the cloud: this is the 3 screen strategy: whether phone, PC, or TV, Microsoft’s vision is to make your life and everyday tasks easier, simpler, fun.

By the way did you know 60% of regular MSN/ Windows Live users own at least one credit card and 29% regularly use their credit card as method of payment when making internet purchases so we have unique access to a relevant and engaged audience (TGI GB Q1 2011).

I hope you found this useful!

Lucinda Johnson, Client Business Manager, Microsoft Advertising

P.S. Here are a few useful infographics:

1. Consumers and General Insurance: Infographic Overview (Dec 2011: Mintel)

2. Consumers and Retail Banking: Infographic Overview (Oct 2011: Mintel)

3. Consumer Attitudes towards Debt – UK: Infographic Overview (Aug 2011: Mintel)

* Source: GMI/Mintel: 1,968 internet users with a current account

**November comscore 2011

If you’re a small business owner new to the world of online advertising, you may be a bit overwhelmed by all the of the options and features that are available to you. How can all of this help you sell your product or service? I won’t try to give you a full seminar on online advertising in this post. Instead, I’m going to give you two quick suggestions: finding more keywords and experimenting. Finding more keywords What queries do people use to find stuff on Bing? How can you get…(read more)

The iPad app follows hot on the heels of MSN’s first Xbox app, released last December.

What’s in the MSN app?

The MSN app for iPad presents the same exclusive and original content as found on the new-look MSN UK.

It’s easy to find what you want with stories being split into six main channels: News, Sport, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Cars and Video. You’ll also find our pick of the day’s best features’ in Editor’s Picks.

• In the News channel you can find all of the latest-breaking UK and world news, as well as the web’s oddest news stories.
• The Sport channel contains all of the latest happenings in the world of football, rugby, cricket, Formula One and more.
• If you like Entertainment, you will find a wealth of TV, movies, music and celebrity gossip here.
• MSN’s award-winning MSN Cars channel has everything for the motoring enthusiast, with comprehensive buyers’ guides, car reviews and used car listings.
• Lifestyle is the place to go to find everything you need to know to look good and feel great; it also includes expert insight into Tech & Gadgets, Food, Travel and Money.
• MSN’s Video hub includes a bumper-crop of classic TV shows and the web’s funniest viral videos.

Search the MSN app with Bing
Just like its desktop counterpart, the MSN iPad app uses Bing to search the web. The Bing search box can be found at the top of your screen. To perform a search just tap into the Bing search box located at the top of the app. Don’t worry about having to exit the app, Bing will perform a web search without leaving the app – just hit ‘search’ on the keyboard to begin. When you’re done, tap the blue ‘Done’ button to close the search window.

How do I get it?

The MSN iPad app is available to download now, for free. You can easily install iPad apps using either iTunes (on your PC/Mac) or through the iPad App Store on your iPad.

• iPad:Make sure you have turned on WiFi or have 3G enabled. Click on the App Store icon from your iPad home screen. Search for “MSN iPad”.
• iTunes: Open iTunes on your PC/Mac. Select the ‘iTunes Store’ from the menu on the left – it’s underneath ‘Store’. Click on the App Store tab. There are buttons for both iPad and iPhone apps, to see apps specifically available for the iPad click on the iPad button.

Happy viewing!

In another world several years and several media plans ago, I was in advertising sales. I began my stint working at my college newspaper (remember those?) entering hand-written insertion orders and frantically leafing through the daily edition to see that my client’s investment appeared in print as beautifully as I imagined when I sold the space. Graduation came and went and so began my collection of media sales adventures. Online display? Check. Search? Of course. Radio? I’ll do it.  The list of media I’ve become familiar with over the years is quite diverse, but one thing has always and will always stay the same. This question from nearly every single client:

“How much should I spend on advertising?”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

In a recent interview at CES 2012, our own Mel Carson caught up with WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell to discuss the answer to this very common question. If you’ve ever spent even a second wondering what percentage of sales you should devote to your efforts and where you should be placing your advertising dollar, look no further than the video below:

Great insights from Sir Martin Sorrell and a fun interview to watch to boot. As you start planning for the coming year, consider your audience and where you would like to connect with them when reviewing your budgets – and don’t be afraid to make mistakes! (Just make two good decisions to balance everything).

Stay Curious!

Shelby Healy – Microsoft Advertising