MSN.com Becomes An Office 2007 App
MSN Office 2007 ad Hosted on ZooomrMicrosoft did something really cool with MSN.com the last two days, turning it into a marketing opportunity for Office 2007. Atop the page, they put an ad that morphed into an Office application window, complete with a Ribbon user interface. It only does two things primarily, letting you change the fonts in the links box, and alter the formatting of an ad on the page, but both take advantage of the Live Preview feature to show formatting changes on the fly.
This is a really cool exercise, one so good that you have to try it out. I really hope Microsoft gets good feedback here, and tries it out on other sites, like non-Microsoft sites, showing off some of the genuine coolness in Office 2007. My advice is to target sites frequented by college students, who have to write a lot of documents, would probably like to jazz them up a little, tend to notice advertising, can get the product for cheaper through volume licensing, and would find the whole thing cool. The opportunity to edit the Facebook homepage until it looked plain stupid would be a great marketing move, and those college students could become influencers for the product.
And, in turn, maybe Microsoft could convince some college students that it isn’t all about the Mac. Because, seriously, on college campuses these days, the Mac is making scary headway. Microsoft needs to be more concerned about reaching university students enamored by Mac cool.
(via Long, who has a video of it and word from the team that made this)
meh. Annoying. Had to help out a user yesterday with Outlook issues, opened IE over Remote Assistance on their machine and saw the “Ribbon” junk on the MSN page.
We were not amused.
Comment by DosFreak | April 20, 2007
I agree, that the marketing strategy was awesome. In my opinion, only a Microsoft hater could think it was annoying. How does opening IE, with MSN as the default homepage, affect someone helping a person with Outlook? I assume you were using IE to go to a website, so all you were doing is typing in a URL once IE loaded, and the content of the MSN would not stop you from doing that. How is the Office 2007 marketing on MSN annoying, unless you are a MSFT hater and don’t like seeing their marketing?
Comment by Tim Taricco | April 20, 2007
1. I hate all marketing.
2. It was confusing.
3. It was unnecessary.
4. Alot of people for some reason use MSN as their homepage instead of about:blank and they do not like radical unecessary changes to their home pages. (Huge ass advertisements for something they do not want).
5. I’v heard reports of people’s IE6 crashing when loading MSN with this change. (Hasn’t happened to me).
6. It’s ginormous.
She opened IE to show us something. I can’t remember what it was.
Comment by DosFreak | April 23, 2007
[…] Microsoft has done it again, transforming MSN.com into an Office 2007 program. This time, though, it’s not Word, but Powerpoint. You’re able to change a chart on the page into several different styles, then change the color scheme used by the chart. The point of the promo is to show how easy it is to make professional graphics in Office 2007, using just two clicks to make it look however you want. […]
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