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.

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.