• by Phil Leggiere , January 9, 2003

Though Bill Gates committed software giant Microsoft many years ago to become not only an Internet company but the Internet company, the Microsoft Network (MSN) has remained a distant second to its nemesis AOL, with about 9 million subscribers to AOL’s 35 million.

Most second-place challengers in a similar situation would have to be content with trying to slowly, steadily chip away at the leader’s share. But Microsoft, of course, is decidedly not like most companies. In launching its upgraded MSN8 Internet service in October, the company was embarking on a major assault on AOL. Digging deep into its very deep pockets, MSN, in partnership with offline agency McCann-Erickson and online agent Avenue A, initiated a truly mass-scaled integrated online-offline campaign.

“Our overarching mandate for the launch of MSN8,” recalls Kate Murphy, VP and account supervisor for McCann-Erickson, which handled TV broadcast, “was to go for a broad reach to as wide a mass of adult Internet users as possible. The initial challenge was to simultaneously reach people on- and offline in a very concentrated period.”

The “It’s Better With The Butterfly” TV campaign launched on October 24, the same day as the product, running for 10 days of heavy national buys on quality entertainment, news, and sports programs on both cable and network.

“We were interested in getting the very widest reach of affluent adults who were heavy Internet users,” says Murphy, “a relatively upscale 25–54 demographic of both sexes. We stayed away during the first phase from children, teens, or young adults, as we wanted to target people responsible for household buying decisions.”

“All of our research made it clear that most people were not enthusiastic about their ISP [Internet Service Provider] and were looking for something else,” she continues. “Our TV ad tried to speak to that need in two ways. We wanted to let people know there was an alternative, that all ISPs were not alike. We also wanted to convey a warm feeling about MSN, showing the ISP as a family friend, something they can be enthused about.”

The butterfly logo, a McCann-Erickson creation, had first been developed as a logo for the MSN site a few years ago. However, for the MSN8 launch McCann-Erickson decided to highlight the logo for the first time as a pivotal strategic persona or spokes-character for the campaign.

“The butterfly is a flexible symbol of change, adaptation, and evolution,” observes Murphy, “which we thought was perfect to give a sense of MSN8 as a major breakthrough for Internet service. It’s also a great character in its own right to tell stories with, entertaining and informing consumers.”

The 60-second launch TV spot showed the emergence of the butterfly from a cocoon with the message “A whole new Internet service has landed.” Lenny Kravitz’s hit tune “Fly Away” was chosen as the ad’s soundtrack. Kravitz himself performed the song live in New York’s Central Park the day of the product launch. The company also kicked off an outdoor campaign that day with the unveiling of a full-size billboard in Times Square.

The same day McCann-Erickson TV spots began to air, Avenue A’s five-day “high impact” online campaign began as well. The initial goals were to use full-screen takeovers to bring TV-like production values to the Web.

“Usually, even in big product launches the online component is more niche-oriented than the TV campaign,” explains Della Quimby, client strategist for Avenue A. “Broadcast goes for mass brand exposure, with the Web serving as more of a targeted follow-up medium. But this campaign was very different. We wanted to create a mass buzz online simultaneous with the one being created offline through the TV spots. Our creative aimed to replicate as closely as possible the TV butterfly spot. We wanted to reach 90% of regular Internet users in a space of just five days. With the Net that’s a huge challenge, first because the Net is such a fragmented place, and second because, for obvious reasons, we couldn’t use the two biggest rival portals, AOL and Yahoo!”

The way Avenue A decided to get around those obstacles was to blanket as many of the most popular specialty sites (news, financial, technology, and lifestyle) as possible where heavy net users congregated. The Web campaign was focused on full home page takeovers of 12 high-traffic sites, including About.com, NYTimes.com, Match.com, Classmates.com, ABC News, CNET, and Ask Jeeves. In addition to home page “takeovers,” Avenue A repeated the ad as often as possible throughout other pages on each site to insure frequency. “Execution was a real challenge,” acknowledges Quimby, “because what we were attempting was really an industry first. It was an educational process for publishers as well as for us and Microsoft.”

The first high-impact wave of the MSN8 campaign had a single focus both online and offline: to generate awareness and buzz about the upgraded service. While follow-up studies of the launch results were still being conducted as of this writing, both Avenue A and McCann-Erickson claimed very positive early indications.

“For us it was an achievement just to have an online execution this ambitious come off without a problem, without any sites going down,” explains Quimby. “Remember, home page takeovers were a first for most of the publishers we worked with.” According to Quimby the ads succeeded in dramatically increasing awareness about, interest in, and intent to try MSN8. Murphy credits the initial launch blitz for creating national buzz around the launch and dramatically increasing product awareness in a very short time.

While TV and online ads ramped up awareness, McCann-Erickson also placed full-page print ads during the launch period in national newsweeklies and technology, finance, and lifestyle magazines aimed at an affluent, Internet-savvy market. “Though less intensive, the print component of the campaign was also very important,” says Murphy. “A page of print gave us great real estate to go into detail about the positive attributes of MSN8 and to differentiate the product from competitors.”

As critical as the high-visibility launch ads were to the overall campaign, both Quimby and Murphy emphasize that they were only the first phase of a two-phase process. A second wave of both online and offline activity commenced in November, hot on the heels of the launch, and is scheduled to continue in 2003.

“Beyond the high-impact phase,” Quimby explains, “our goal is targeted measurement of user attitudes and evaluation of various attributes and features of MSN8 by classes of users, for instance broadband vs. non-broadband users.”

Follow-up targeted online ads will appear in fewer venues — approximately five or six of the original 12 sites — and will emphasize special features of MSN8, such as shared browsing, customized parental control, and photo-editing tools for email. The targeted ads will allow consumers to sample specific MSN8 features, and will elicit feedback.

“Second-phase ads will continue to be geared to increasing awareness and interest in MSN8,” says Quimby. “But we also want to further leverage that interest to learn as much as possible about consumer behavior — what people want to use MSN8 for — and evaluation, what they think of it and how it could better serve their needs. This level of targeting is where we think online adds enormous value. We’re constantly evaluating consumer needs and expectations as the product rolls out, and that knowledge will be used to create new spots, both online and offline.”

On the TV front, McCann-Erickson moved into the second phase with a cluster of follow-up ads, employing the butterfly character to focus on specific services MSN8 provides. One ad, which highlights the product’s spam filter, shows the butterfly in action stopping spam by pushing junk mail back through a mail slot to a surprised mailman. In another the butterfly instructs parents on how to set up customized parental controls for filtering content for the kids.

“Now that we’re succeeding in generating mass awareness about the launch, we can home in on specific classes of users with particular reasons for making the switch to MSN,” Murphy says. “This phase is where we see closely integrated offline and online work really paying off. As the online component tells us more about who is using particular features and why, we’re able to customize new spots with a great deal more targeting power.”