Here at IF! we were lucky enough to be invited to the Microsoft Digital Day in London today. We hoped to blog live from the event but the lack of a internet connection put paid to that. Microsoft is a company that we’ve always been slightly sceptical of, the work they do always seems to be good rather than exceptional, certainly from a users point of view. From an aesthetic and design point of view Microsoft have never quite cracked it as well as Apple or Google. However, as Russell has pointed out, Microsoft do work incredibly hard to please all the people all the time.
The event was well orchastrated and the hospitality was pretty good too, plenty of food and drink for all, and best of all the event was held just a 10 minute walk from my flat. The speakers were a mixture of Microsoft employees and third parties. First up was Steve Berkowitz, Senior VP Digital Ad Solutions, he provided a brief overview of the online market. The second speaker was Anne Kirah a Microsoft anthropologist and she provided some really interesting insight into the way Microsoft now work on the development of new services. She encouraged the audience to think in terms of not users but people, that people generate the need for applications and these applications should be built for the people not forced on them.
Next up was a section on social media which did a great job of dispelling the idea that they are ‘just for kids’. Caroline Vogt, Head of Microsoft’s International Research put together a compelling case for brands to interact with social networks saying that people are interested in advertisers provided there is some kind of value exchange. Caroline was also the first speaker to actually mention other brands like YouTube and MySpace, although throughout the day not a single Microsoft presenter mentioned Google!
My favourite presentation of the day was given by Blake Irving the VP for Windows Live Platform. He took some of Caroline Vogts thoughts on advertising within social media and brought them to life. He also demonstrated how Windows Live / Web 2.0 brought people together. The most interesting part of Blake’s presentation was his demonstration of behavioural advertising. Imagine the banner ad at the top of this page having a link below it saying ‘why did I see this ad?’ if you clicked on the link it would give you the opportunity to select your interests etc to provide far more accuarately targeted ads.
Nick Hynes of IMW made some interesting observations about search and how important it is. Sharon Baylay of Microsoft talked about the UK and online advertising. Chris Ward showed some exciting new developments in search, particularly 3D photography, for example taking users, sorry people’s, photographs of objects/surroundings and putting them together to create navigable 3D environments. He also showed the practical applications of this such as local advertising and journey planning tools.
The afternoon session was kicked off by Mitchell Davies, the CEO of Massive, his presentation was full on gaming and he showed some pretty compelling demographic stats and also evidence to show that gaming was a lean forward and not a lean back medium. The opportunities and trackability of in game advertising seem huge and this is certainly something the ad industry needs to look at more closely.
Simon Waldmen of the Guardian Media Group talked about how the Guardian newspaper has adapted to the web and how the web compliments its printed version. Michael Cooper of Microsoft demoed the New York Times reading device which attempts to create a more user friendly version of the digital newspaper.
To finish Steve Ballmer the CEO of Microsoft delivered a keynote speech, which was full of theatre but light on real content. However, he managed to communicate Microsoft’s work ethic and desire to succeed. In addition, the theme of authenticity cropped up several times and he made the suggestion that when dealing online honesty and authenticity were key to successfully interacting with consumers.
Overall the day was great and went a long way to removing some of my prejudices towards Microsoft. The presentations were all interesting and provided a great education for much of the UK media contingent. It also hopefully gave the clients present a bit more a belief in social media.
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