This month, Torin Douglas speaks with Paul Davies, director of marketing at Microsoft, about digital strategies – and teaming up with Edgar Wright, director of Shaun of the Dead, to help brush off the ‘tired uncle’ look of Internet Explorer…
What do you do when you’re up against the likes of Apple and Google and you think your brand has the aura of a “tired uncle”? That was the problem facing Paul Davies, marketing and communications director of Microsoft, when they were about to launch a new version of Internet Explorer.
Davies has been at Microsoft for seven years – “learning the art of digital” as he puts it – after stints as head of brand and advertising at More Than and then Direct Line insurance. He’s responsible for Microsoft’s consumer portfolio of brands in the UK including Windows, Windows Phone, Surface, Bing, Internet Explorer, MSN and Outlook, and is also a key figure in ISBA, as deputy chair of its executive committee.
In the latest of my interviews with marketing leaders about their use of media in the digital world, the campaign he was keenest to talk about was an online collaboration with Edgar Wright – director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End – designed to shake off Internet Explorer’s lacklustre image.
“The challenge was that the target audience we were seeking had fallen out of love with Internet Explorer, they’d gone to Google Chrome, because that was the bright new shiny thing, which happens a lot in the tech world.”
“The challenge for the brand was that the target audience we were seeking had fallen out of love with Internet Explorer, they’d gone to Google Chrome, because that was the bright new shiny thing, which happens a lot in the tech world,” Davies said.
“Internet Explorer had the aura perhaps of being the ‘tired uncle’ and we wanted to change that and make it much more contemporary and more cutting-edge because it had a lot of new features that were interesting to the tech audience.”
So Microsoft curated an online animated serial, in four episodes, called The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator. It was a filmic, online graphic novel written by Wright and drawn by a Marvel and Lucasfilm illustrator Tommy Lee Edward.
“At the end of episode one, we asked people – do you want to make a film with Edgar Wright…join in, tell him what you want to happen next? We did that iteratively for four episodes and it was a huge success, certainly one of the most creative digital projects I’ve been involved in.”
To bring it to a wider audience, Microsoft booked large out-of-home sites in Shoreditch, to reach the cutting-edge community, and an entire ad break during Channel 4’s UK premiere of Attack The Block, which Wright executive-produced.
“We showed highlights of what had been created online, as a film within a film,” said Davies. “We knew his audience would be watching and we got a huge spike in traffic as a result.”
You can hear more of Paul Davies’s thoughts on how digital is changing the marketing world in the ten-minute video at the top of the page – including the Chinese commercial for Microsoft Windows 8 he really wishes he could show in the UK.
The Torin Douglas Interview is sponsored by Sky IQ – to find out how Sky IQ insight can help improve your TV advertising effectiveness and maximise your return on investment, click here.
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