Darren Huston

Microsoft Show Off New Innovations

Read the speech by Darren Huston.

Darren Huston

When I (Darren Huston) spoke at the forays a few months ago, I talked about this analogy of a forest fire. Now a forest fire can be very scary because it burns through the brush it pushes you to the edge. It flames are around you, they look at your heels but the way to think about a forest fire like any transformation is what happens on the other side.

The transformation that we're skiing is a land that we're seeing as a landscape that won't be made up of banner ads and blue links but rather rich immersive and engaging content.

It's also a landscape made up of one & zeros and bits & bytes and the beauty of that is, it allows advertising to connect to the business and the value systems that happen within your company.

So whether it's the point of sale at the local Safeway and linking that all the way up to the advertisement or its buying a new car like will demonstrate and linking that perception experience down to point of purchase that's the beauty of digital and finally that forest fire is creating a landscape that reflects a new medium.

It's a medium that has expanded options, new interaction points, infinite perspective and yes even beauty as you've seen a lot of devices that have been released recently the beauty of the Internet and the beauty of digital is really coming to four. So what I want to shift to now is one of the key trends is going on in digital and we call that multi-screen advertising.

Multi-screen is a reflection of the fact that there are so many different devices in consumers lifestyles each of which present marketing opportunities.

We did a study of 1,200 consumers this past spring around the topic of multi-screen advertising. 69% of them actually embraced the concept of multi-screen advertised and really believed that it would give them better recall of ads and would make content just more useful for them.

Another really interesting fact from this study is that if you take TV advertising and combine it with online video advertising it improves consumer recall by over 53%. But if you look back 9 months ago, online video you couldn't sell out, you couldn't sell the inventory associative video.

If you look today we are sold out across all of our video offerings almost everywhere in the world because of this simple fact that video works great when it's seen on both the TV and online and finally and this is almost just shocking media consumption continues to increase despite the dramatic amount of media.

We already consume media consumption is up in the United States, I mean how is that possible partly it's because people are time shifting their media consumption you know using things like TiVo and other products, their place shifting their media consumption because they're taking on the go and also there's a lot of simultaneous consumption.

This is a huge trend where people are watching TV with their phone and their PC all at once which is giving multiples on the way that people consume media and it's a super important trend for marketers in the audience to know that's particularly young people rarely watch television without another screen readily available around them.

So with this, we've also shown that across this multiple screen there's a great opportunity for marketers to tell a relevant and connected story.

We also are going to prove and show to you through an example of how those connected stories then add value to the marketed by increasing the impact of the message.

Bettina Sherick

From a digital perspective one thing we do is that we need okay or go home. I think Microsoft has an interesting proposition to the consumer because there's so many ways that they touch them. There's obviously the portal site with which internationally is very important but then they also have the Xbox platform and Xbox Live and they have ways for us to reach that consumer that may not necessarily be watching television and lastly there's of course the windows media mobile platform which is something that we experimented with in five countries for this release.

Jon Landau, Avatar Producer

Most people give their first information about a movie online whether that's watching a trailer, whether that's reading some news about it and I think we as an industry have to embrace the online experience and roll it into all of our different marketing opportunities.

Now no longer really is it about what the critic's right. It's what our people Twitter what do people you know say in their blogs and if you don't embrace them they're not goanna brace your fill.

Bettina Sherick

One of the things that this phone has done for us is now we can go to Microsoft and say, hey have you thought about this so it really is now a working partnership.

Jon Landau

Think out of the box, be original, I think if avatar advertisers & marketers think this way that they will be successful whatever campaigns they run.

Darren Huston

So avatar is a really inspiring example of a movie that was digital in making and completely digital in marketing. We also did some research after the launch of the avatar movie looking at this concept of multi-screen consumers and what kind of impact multi-screen marketing had on them.

These results were absolutely incredible; I think a lot of us have been involved in traditional marketing for many years. Now that if you run a TV ad and support it with bill boards or radio or a newspaper you can get multiples on your investment.

Well the same thing happens in the digital space, the research showed that multi-screen consumers were three times as likely to go see avatar versus those that have only seen the advertising on one screen and nearly half of all consumers who saw all three ads went to see avatar in the theater helping to make it a truly global success. So clearly multi-screen advertising drives powerful value to brands and marketers.