You Dream It. We Deliver It. - Microsoft Advertising Business Forum - Cannes 2009

Bonjour from Cannes!

Today we hosted a business forum for the Microsoft delegates. This was our opportunity to pull together our delegates, share our vision, and show off our latest integrated advertising technology.

We'll be posting our business forum video a little later so you can see the highlights - but until that's live I wanted to provide some of thing that had more of that "je ne sais quoi" if you will.

Here are my top highlights from the conference.

To be honest it is a bit hard to choose, but since 5 is Coco Chanel's lucky number and since Chanel has gone digital - I'm running with the top 5 highlights.

1. Listening to the voices of our customers thru two creative videos. Love these two sketches - Sketch 1 & Sketch 2 from our customers that showcase what they have discovered, faced, and pushed the limits on this year with digital media and marketing.

2. East vs West discussion and showcase between creatives Naoki Ito and Tony Högqvist. Congrats to Ito who is picking up several awards at the festival this year and who was behind the creation of this Love Distance campaign that 1M people in Japan tracked over 4 weeks before revealing their brand. Högqvist showcased the work he developed with H&M on their spring fashion line where they delivered an online endless catwalk so the movement of the clothes is highlighted.

3. Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher from Microsoft captured the audience letting us know that the future is already here and that if we want to know the future that we just need to look at what is under development because the things that are going to impact our lives in the next 10 years is actually already invented.

4. The current state of our industry defined by CVP of Advertising and Publishing at MSFT, Scott Howe. We've all had moments where we have been wowed by technology and had moments where we are cursing technology - love it or hate it the one thing we face daily in digital marketing is its ongoing evolution. Howe likened our experience today to the days before Russian chemist Mendeleyev created the period table of elements. Without the structure of the table scientists around the world couldn't speak the same "language" and with it there was an explosion of creativity and advancement. Microsoft is committed to creating this "table" if you will and has been working on aggressive advances over the last 12 months to deliver the right set of tools to advertisers.

5. The success of the Chanel and Deadliest Catch campaigns. Donna Murphy from Discovery said that the campaign for Deadliest Catch was "dead on," and through her partnership with Microsoft Discovery was able to capture the attitude of the show online and reel in record numbers for their 5^th season's premier.

There were so many great quotes and moments in the forum - too many to include in this post - so we'll follow up with the highlights in video so you can view them when you have a minute.

But to end on another integrated campaign that was very cool - we were shown a proof of concept Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince campaign, which if I have one takeaway from this campaign it's create once, and then let your campaign run across multiple devices - Xbox, mobile, PC and web - which really is pure digital magic.

This Harry Potter concept showcased the power of Silverlight on Xbox LIVE. We announced during this session that we will bring IAB-recognized rich media technologies including Silverlight to Xbox LIVE, the world’s largest interactive network on TV. So what exactly does this mean….this will help agencies and advertisers create, launch, measure and quickly respond to campaigns through powerful controls and integrated tools.   From instream video ads, rich, discoverable micros-sites, and animations, Silverlight brings advertising ideas to life and helps make campaigns can be more nimble, more powerful and more effective.  Finally you can create once, express everywhere.

Cheers,
Jenny