Marcelo Calbucci

Marketing campaigns for big brands sometimes puzzles me. Companies sometimes hit it right, sometimes fail miserable. Microsoft has more than their fair share of failures, and the new Hotmail campaign is one of those failures.

I saw this campaign for the first time last week and I can’t remember exactly where, but it was a footnote on someone emails or on some banner on some website. All that it said was “Hotmail – Tools for the new busy”. To which I replied in my head “What?”

As a big brand spending millions of dollars on marketing, Microsoft marketing understands the value of using multiple means of taking the message to the end user. Email, web, TV, radio, movie theaters, buses, print, etc., they will do it all for sure. Just a day later from seeing that footnote for the first time, I heard an ad on NPR “brough you by Hotmail, tools for the new busy”. And I go “what?” again.


Telling it twice


The worse thing that can happen on any marketing campaign is for people to misunderstand the message. That’s really bad and is a situation that is as rare as a medium-sized meteor hitting the earth. It happens, but just about a few times a year. That’s not the case for this Hotmail campaign. Users cannot misunderstand the message, because no one can understand what the message  is to begin with, which I call the “what” effect.

You really know you have a bad marketing message when the first thing people say is “what?”. Picture this: You’ve seen a commercial presented to you by your spouse who works at Microsoft marketing. You ask her “what?” and she explains what they’ve meant by that and you go “oh, I see”. That’s bad.

Go for the How

Advertising and commercials should be self-contained and self-explanatory. In other words, you should always say “I get it” and decide to either move on or to learn more. In other words, someone sees your commercial on TV and the first thing that comes to his mind is “How?” That’s a great thing. You caught them.

Let me give it a try. I’m not saying this is great, but what do you think of this campaign: “Hotmail – Tools for less email”. That’s a How-moment. That will get people curious because email overload is a problem for everyone. I know it’s not sexy filled with buzz words, but it gets one point across and make people move to the next stage, to learn how they can get less email.

And just to be clear, I’m not picking at Microsoft, I’m picking at the Hotmail campaign per se. I think every once in a while Microsoft does have good marketing campaigns (“Bing & Decide”),  but most of them fail (“Vista – Wow”, “I’m a PC”, etc.)