Firstly, Hungarians do visit international portals and consume contents in other languages. Windows Live Messenger is the most popular IM service here and for a while you can book spaces and advertise on Messenger spaces directly from Hungary. Microsoft itself also started to pay more attention on its Hungarian house-ads and the first post is about one of them.

Under the Messenger Buddy List there is a small banner space. Microsoft placed its own advertisement there. When users moves the cursor on top of it, the banner expands. Now here is the story of the communication: “Office brings you joy!… Buy three Office Small Business products and we send a bunch of flower to someone you love…”

but its not over yet. When you click on it, you are directed to the landing page where you can find short video stories of two young adults who explain unnatural stories like how calm they can sleep now at nights and how much easier the business became now that they use legal Microsoft Small Business softwares.

Microsite:

Okay, now let’s go step by step.

1. Target audience: small business owners
First I saw this ad in office hours and I thought that they use time target but as I can see it now too, obviously they don’t. Even though I haven’t noticed any consciousness in age target when I made a small research I am sure that they use it somehow. Anyway, as I saw it many times it reached me well and I am a good target for them.

2. Creative format and idea: expandable banner
I have to add to this that Microsoft want to sell this space for Hungarian advertisers as they have a promotion of buy one get two ad impressions. Otherwise this creative format is not reasonable at all and even the creative execution doesn’t want to take advantage on this. I am trying to understand what the point is because at the moment when I see the creative it has the message for me that there are one reason to buy Microsoft Office, to send a gift to our beloved ones.

And let’s see the contras:
– The promotional message is useless, even they couldn’t link it to the content on the microsite.
– Actors are struggling with the texts they have to say, they are not credible (the copywriter should have worked more on that too)
– Even though the design and the environment is nicely done the stories are really unnatural that makes it a waste of money.

But, there is a pro:
+ Microsoft used videos to deliver the information that is a pretty new trend especially in B2C communication. – So bad that they hadn’t pay enough attention to the content…