Britt’s ‘reality phone show’ ran from 12 - 20 October 2011. Within that short period the campaign racked up 6.1m views, while the homepage takeover attracted 2.7m unique visitors, while the special website detelefoonvanbritt.nl accounted for more than 600,000 unique visitors. On average, every visitor spent nearly four minutes browsing through Britt’s phone and experiencing Windows 7.5. Moreover, an average of 16 seconds was spent on banners across all rich media communications, whereas the benchmark set was only 4.38 seconds. Given the success of the campaign, Microsoft has decided to roll out the concept internationally.

Our solution was not to shout out about the great interface, but to tempt the target group into trying it out. To do so, we launched a social experiment with Britt Dekker, currently Holland’s most popular starlet and our version of Jessica Simpson. She was given a new Windows Phone that was linked to an online virtual phone, meaning that you could browse through her private phone, live 24/7 and follow real time what she was doing. Everything she did on Twitter and Facebook, every email and all her photos and videos could be seen live. Even her calendar and address book were made public. The virtual phone was put on a special website and in a homepage takeover on MSN. The campaign was driven by banners on MSN and Nu.nl (our country’s no. 1 news site), as well as five viral videos Britt made herself on her mobile phone.

The objective was to launch the Windows 7.5 operating system for smartphones in an impacting way. Knowing that consumers are focused on the phones themselves, rather than the software that drives them. Therefore our main challenge was to turn a ‘low interest’ product into something that everyone wants to experience. Because we knew that once people had tried Windows 7.5, they were impressed with its new interface.