Shoot your dream Windows Phone 7 ad!

January 30, 2011 | By rush24

I’ve been thinking, we always talk about “if I had it my way, this is how a Windows phone 7 ad would look like”. Well, here is your chance! Instead waiting for one from the the marketing team at Microsoft, let us harness the power of the community. We should come up with best enthusiast made ads, one that we think our friends and family will understand and persuade them to buy a WP7 device. I have a few guidelines to accomplish this goal.

The ads will be ideally 30 to 60 seconds long
Focus on only one feature of the phone or…
Show how the hubs work together to solve the going jumping in and out of apps dilemma
You could include a music track or a voice over

The guidelines are not set in stone so you are free to break them. For our readers who may not have a phone, or don’t trust their cinematic skills, I bet you can write a script and post it in the comments. Someone else can pick that up and shoot the ad. Once you are done with the videos, upload them to YouTube and post the links in the comments. I will then aggregate them into a collection and post them here. If we end up with some good ones, we may have to vote to find the best ad! I would especially like to see ads featuring the Zune hub, including ones that show the benefits of the Zune pass.

Just a word of caution, if you create an ad featuring the people hub or something that may contain personal information, make sure you blur that out or else enter temporary dummy content for the purpose. We don’t want to have your friends’ information all over the internet. Embedded below is an iPhone commercial to give you an idea what direction I think the ads may look like.

The stage is set, it is now up to you! As they say in Hollywood, 3-2-1 Action!

About Rush24

Rush24 loves everything Microsoft and is fascinated by the influence of technology in everyday life.

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Tagged advertising, marketing

andrewbares

Great idea
http://twitter.com/Saad073 @Saad073

This is a great idea. I would totally try to do it but the best camera I have is the phone I'm supposed to be making a video of lol

crazy_satelite

haha, like that;) Anyway, great idea!!

pinguino1

Rush, That's a great idea. I follow you and love your contributions BUT with all respect I hope MS doesn't follow your guidelines. You are a geek, I'm a geek. We are the worst marketers. For us is hard to understand but people don't buy features, people buy emotionaly!! That's Professional SALES 101.

Haven't we learn from Steve Jobs? he sold the millions of his first phone with a FEATURELESS phone! He appeals to the emotions. He knows Marketing. We don't. MS doesn't either.

freetaik

Not entirely true re Jobs : his ads are all about features presented simply with 'the hand'. Still great idea and hope someone takes this up. Have you seen the LG Optimus 7 ad? Work of genius!
smoothcrooner

I'm not a geek, I'm a human being!:)
rush24

You are right about appealing to emotions with the ads. The face time commercials come to mind. The guidelines are just a loose framework to help people getting started and anyone is free to break them.
Let us know of any ideas for an ad that appeals to the emotions

pinguino1

It's the eternal benefits vs features. People buy emotionally but justify it logically. The decision maker is Feelings: How do you FEEL with the features of a product. The iphone ads you inserted here are a perfect example. Let's watch and listen carefully to the emotional words (in Caps). In all the 4 ads He is talking about his life not about the phone:
1-His wife WANTS a coffe maker. her sister LIKES red. It happens that they used "A phone" to acomplish that. it could be any phone.
2-He is EXCITED about the trip preparations not about the phone. Of course the phone helped.
3-They WANT a dog. The dog becomes PART of the FAMILY. Not the Phone. The phone just helped.
4-He is a FAMILY MAN, Gramma LOVE to see his kids. It's NOT about how many mpix the iPhone has.

Bottom line, emotional feelings are at the forefront of these ads and the features are persived through the subconcious mind. I wish I could be that creative. Like they said "I don't need to be be a cook to know the soup tastes great."
Hope this help our creative people to come out with what MS hasn't been able to do.

Jchavez

that's all theu really need to do show the os in action and what I can do then ppl will notice and push it hard! On the internet espeically! MS. Marketing is really terible, they just show the start screen in ever add no features no nothing… Show the strong point that ppl with recongize like xbox and office show zune say it's the itunes for pc it's not that hard to catch ppls attention and have them like ooooohhhh awww what's that I want it! It looks cool… Cmon M$! STEP UP!!!
http://twitter.com/AaronCT123 @AaronCT123

When's the deadline?

rush24

I think a week should be enough for the first round. Ideally, all submissions should be in by Sunday, February 6th. With the prospects of the first updates coming and mobile world congress on the horizon, I think it will give me time to gather all submissions and post them during that week before the conference. We can then do a second round after, after the conference because there will hopefully be more features revealed by then. Don't worry so much about the deadline because any submissions after then are still okay. It is just that I may not be able to get to them until after Mobile World Congress.

lkl

I believe the average person just wants to talk, text and sometimes use the internet. These are the people you have to appeal to. The ad has to be funny, informative and slick. Look at the Geico ad with the former drill sergeant, brilliant. People know the product, laugh and watches it over and over again. They don't care about dual core or HTML. They just want a good product that works and will update if they say they will.

pinguino1

"They don't care about dual core or HTML" You hit the nail on the head.

braheem

1. show shazam identifying a song
2. press the zune button on the menu after it's identified
3. tap and hold the song for the free download (mention free downloads with the zune pass)
4. play the song (showing off the artist's in the background and the zune interface)
5. pin the artist or song to the start screen for instant access

Just Visiting

@braheem: +1. I don't own a Zune or WP7 device (yet), but I love music…I visualized your idea as a television commercial – works for me!

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=646490523 David Talbert

I was thinking of making one this week as I was getting tired of the weak microsoft ads that do not show the true features of WP7 like the iphone ads do.