Data Driven Cortana Campaign

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

This week Microsoft unveiled a state-of-the-art, data-powered digital out-of-home (OOH) campaign devised to showcase the versatility of voice-activated personal assistant Cortana and how it can enhance people’s day-to-day life.

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Dentsu Aegis Network and m:united (McCann Worldgroup’s Microsoft team) are leveraging both Microsoft’s collection of data sources and the latest OOH automated technology to create a highly contextual and geo-located outdoor campaign, delivering thousands of tailored variations everyday in key locations across the UK. Each execution will highlight how Cortana smart functionality can help users organise day-to-day activities smoothly.

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Cortana is the digital assistant from Microsoft, personal to every individual. Through her understanding of each person’s needs she can provide tailored services: like information on locally relevant music events or restaurants, reminders based on location, people or time, play songs instantly on request, open apps, tell you how long it will take to get to your next meeting, provide instant search results and even tell you predictions for live events and much more.

The campaign will draw from a combination of weather, travel, location, business and cultural events data using Microsoft’s Cortana emulator technology directly to bring her to life, creating optimised executions featuring a mix of helpful, light hearted and thought-provoking creative content across all the different locations.

Paul Davies, Marketing Director at Microsoft, said: “Just like Cortana, this campaign is personal, flexible, and hyper relevant to the context against which the ads are served, using location, date and time data. We have used digital technology as a creative canvas to showcase how Cortana helps people manage everyday life seamlessly and in a powerful way. With nearly 10,000 variants, we believe we have created the UK’s first truly bespoke outdoor campaign that adapts to its current environment with a dynamic complexity never seen before.”

To bring Cortana’s intelligent capabilities to life and ensure maximum audience engagement, there are 241 unique content posters that will change in real-time based on a set of pre-defined rules and data for a particular moment of the day, generating a total of 9,640 poster variations.

Kaye Dolan, Associate Client Director at Dentsu Aegis Network, said: “With this ambitious and complex campaign we are redefining the rules and capabilities of the digital outdoor medium. The deployment of a truly collaborative approach to media strategies has enabled us to unlock the full advantages of digital OOH, while giving us the opportunity to create a genuine and meaningful connection between the Microsoft brand and its target audience.”

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Tom Adamson, Account Director at m:united London, said: “What we love about this campaign is the technology allows us to use a one-to-many medium to deliver a hyper-contextually relevant message at a more individual level. The result is a creative campaign that really amplifies the message that Cortana is your very own personal assistant.”

Dentsu Aegis Network and its OOH network brand Posterscope have been integral to the management and development of both the overall campaign concept and media plan. Meanwhile, advertising agency m:united has been responsible for designing the wealth of creative copy.


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