BIG TECH // SOCIAL MARKETING // AUDIENCE AWARENESS // BRAND STRATEGY

Microsoft // Human-centric creative

YEAR: 2024

Project overview

Microsoft has a robust ecosystem of social channels and customer touch-points that can be tapped to expand the reach of their brand and help drive brand affinity. They needed a fresh approach to social and roadmap to bring the numerous teams who oversee the channels together with a clear vision and best practice structure to perform their best.

The challenge

Microsoft had a conflict of image. They wanted to be part of the digital conversation, beyond just responding to neutral/negative comments on social channels and bring a human-centric strategy to their very tech-focused brand in the age of AI, bots, and the noise of social. The other hurdle was looking at the amount of content requests from multiple sources and defining a consistent voice and creative output for the brand.

My role

Creative Director - overseeing the Copy and Creative teams developing the best-in-class creative used across all 36 social channels for the Microsoft Cloud brand. We partnered with Community Managers, Microsoft Brand team, and Social Media Managers to brainstorm, reflect, and develop success maps for each unique brand within Microsoft Cloud while producing guidance that could be used in the 26 markets each brand also actively promoted within.

The solution

Establish a structured creative system that promoted smart creative development and championed research and expert knowledge of social practices that could be actioned and aligned across multiple markets and channels. Earn trust across Microsoft executive teams with data-backed, expert developed guidelines and proven social success for key campaigns and brand affinity.

brand research & strategy

Creative would host bi-yearly wall crawls bringing key Community Managers, Social Media Managers, and key stakeholders to a week-long workshop reviewing data from each brand channel and social platform to identify what worked, what could be better, and where our instincts were saying we could make the biggest impact moving forward. The output was a deck of results and recommendations for each brand and each channel they were live on.

Microsoft365 - LinkedIn wall crawl Miro Board

Microsoft365 - Executive Recap slide example

Microsoft365 - Instagram wall crawl Miro Board

brand guidance

To ensure the multiple creative and stakeholder teams for the brand were aligned, we released yearly Copywriting and Creative Guidelines to all teams who worked within social content. This allowed us to establish clear vision and best practice guidance that could be replicated and ensure all work was delivered to meet brand excellence standards. The Creative team worked with Social Media Director and released Platform Guidelines for all major platforms including information on what creative works there, best practices, and recommended social content strategy teams could use to develop Content Calendars and Social Strategy plans - helping cut-down on “bad” creative requests that accounted for 20% of requests prior to developing the practice.

Microsoft Creative Guidelines

Microsoft Copywriting Guidelines

Microsoft / Instagram Platform Guide w/internal deck pages

Launching Microsoft Cloud GIPHY channel

Using our research and expert knowledge on what is working and what audiences are looking for, we developed a new channel for Microsoft to bring them authentically into more conversations. The current generation of tech buying power are Millennials who have a history with Microsoft, from remembering their “first AI assistant” Clippy to the hours they spent making ‘art’ in Microsoft Paint, we wanted to lean on that love for heritage while also listening to our audience and producing sharable, GIF content that would be available for them to express themselves on Teams and across social exchanges.

social creative approach

Our research also confirmed what we all know, that motion graphics and approachable brand creative leads to more authentic engagement and dynamic visuals. We used the research findings to develop our creative strategy to bring more sharable moments on social to each Microsoft Cloud channel.

audience research & strategy

Creative and Social Listening partnered together to develop more regular audience insights and reporting for Microsoft to get as close to real-time data analysis and recommendations for key stakeholders to help us pivot more effectively and meet our audience were they were going (before they got there).

Microsoft Excel - Share of Voice Research Deck / pages

Microsoft AI Global Social Listening Report

campaign results

  • The Microsoft GIPHY channel is their most engaged social channel ever - earning 1B organic engagements in the first 6 months after launch.

  • Microsoft used the Copy and Creative Guidelines as the new standard for all partners of the brand, leading to more cohesive creative social output.

  • After hosting wall crawls and producing research and best practice decks bi-yearly - we cut down on bad requests and improved error rates by 98% YoY.

  • We made a case to bring back Clippy, which was met with brand push back. We developed a suite of Clippy GIFs to test our theory and they are still the most used of all GIFs on their channel.