Our challenge was that no one thinks they need OneNote. Merely selling the benefits of another Microsoft application - however useful - simply wouldn't work. So we decided to dramatise the idea that pen and paper are just not up to the job, through the proposition "stationery is bad". As part of a campaign, we created boxes of "rigged" Bic pens that looked exactly like the real thing, but didn't work – vividly demonstrating our point. On closer inspection, each pen carried our microsite url, where OneNote was revealed as the solution and a free trial version could be downloaded.

The pens were left in company receptions and handed out to office workers, in London, Edinburgh and Reading, enabling us to hit some of our key target audience in their offices. The campaign itself broke new ground for Microsoft, and the pens contributed significantly to its success. Hits to the website were well in excess of target. 14% of site visitors downloaded the trial version.