Receiving a brief from Microsoft to shift desire from Apple to its Surface product among teens is no easy task. While Microsoft won’t beat Apple in cool, the Surface is a far more versatile product than its rivals offer, giving it a USP. The Surface has the power of a laptop with the portability of a tablet, meaning you can use it for anything, anywhere.
But how on earth do we get teens to believe this?
We knew we had to deliver a productivity message, but the superficial “cool-factor” of Apple will always win out. We had to make productivity outweigh style with teens –
a tough ask.
There’s one annual moment when teens are shocked into inordinate sensibility. A moment when solemn reflection and studious planning of the future overrides living for the moment … exam results day.
On this day they are bombarded with “what will you do next?” – from parents, teachers, even the media. According to the UK University & Colleges Union (2014) more than one in five students have no idea what they want to do. With budget cuts hitting career advice, they lack much needed support, resulting in a swathe of stressed teens. They feel alone in making, what they believe to be, life-defining decisions.
We wanted to reframe this occasion: show them the plethora of possibilities and make this a uniquely exciting moment in their lives – and if they’re in the market for a new laptop, they should buy one that has the versatility to support them in whatever they decide to pursue.
Identifying the moment was only the first step. We could have crafted a devilishly disruptive social post or a clever media buy, but for this audience and at this sensitive time, we felt the message shouldn’t just come from us.
Again we had to be honest: Microsoft isn’t that credible to our audience, so we collaborated with 25 of the UK’s top teen influencers to create our important message. Together we created an inspiring piece of content, featuring an unprecedented number of vloggers, bloggers and Instagrammers representing every conceivable teen passion area, interest or inclination.
We showed how, at this particular moment, teens should embrace the fact that they could do anything and show how the Surface could support them.
This campaign was given further credibility by the influencers’ own personal content about why they felt this type of support was invaluable to today’s teens. The news feeds of our teen audience bulged with their peer’s personal experiences, with Microsoft Surface integrated subtly into every piece of content.
Last year on results day, Microsoft Surface had an extremely relevant and powerful message, with support from credible, inspirational and popular teen personalities. We also partnered with prospects.ac.uk, so anyone coming to us for advice and information had a place to go to plan their next career step.
Teens saw a whole new side to Microsoft and for the first time, we made them see the value in buying something that will facilitate their dreams and productivity, rather than just make them look cool.
Results
We achieved 928,380 views and 63,757 likes and shares, making it Microsoft UK’s most engaged campaign ever. Those coming to the hero video from our
influencer channel watched 90% of the three-minute video, emblematic of their engagement with the campaign.
However, the best result was in propensity-to-purchase, where in the key back-to-school period, purchase consideration among 16-21-year-olds grew from 37% to 50%, whereas Apple’s declined, proving that we achieved our objective, which at the start seemed impossible.
Jonathan Fraser is chief strategy officer at Exposure Digital
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