We launched a social experiment with Britt Dekker, currently Holland's most popular starlet and our version of Jessica Simpson, famous for being a blabbermouth and definitely someone who attracts attention from a wide audience. We gave her a new Windows Phone and linked it to an online virtual phone on a special website and in a homepage takeover on MSN. This meant you could browse through her mobile phone, live 24/7 and follow real time what she was doing. All her posts, e-mails, photos and videos could be seen live. Even her calendar and address book were made public.

The objective was to launch the new Windows 7.5 operating system in an impactful 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 at least 100,000 potential customers would like to experience. Because we knew that once people had tried Windows 7.5 they were impressed with its new interface.

Britt’s ‘reality phone show’ ran from 12 through 20 October 2011. Within that period the campaign racked up 6.1m views, while the homepage takeover on MSN attracted 2.7m unique visitors and the special website – detelefoonvanbritt.nl – accounted for more than 600,000 unique visitors. On average, every visitor spent nearly 4 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.

Lots of people are curious about the private life of a starlet like Britt. So lots of people couldn't resist the temptation to browse through her private phone. This meant that a large number of consumers experienced the new Windows 7.5 operating system, even though they are usually focused on the smartphone itself. In other words, we used the public attention for Britt to turn a 'low interest' product into a 'high interest' product that everyone wanted to try out.