Microsoft Hack Day

The main challenge was that coders are notoriously difficult to win over they generally think Microsoft is uncool and they are very cynical of all advertising.
The brief was to communicate Microsofts latest developer software; Visual Studio 08 and drive product trial.
The big idea unfolded like this: we set the coder community a challenge to fuel their competitive drive! We partnered with personalised online radio website last.fm (a favourite amongst coders) to host the worlds first last.fm Hack Day. It became a live event where coders could get under the bonnet of last.fm, giving them the tools to create web applications to enhance the last.fm experience. Attendees were incentivised with a chance to win Xboxes, games & £1,000 with every attendee received a trial copy of the new Visual Studio 08 software.
20% (50,000) of the UK coder audience saw the promotion on either last.fm or the target sites carrying our signposting. 150 coders spent over 8 hours of their weekend with Microsoft (Source: Last.fm)
Over 30 applications are now available for last.fm users to download (Source: Last.fm)
There have been over 8,000 downloads of these applications (Source: Last.fm)
A traditional digital ad campaign of this budget would have generated 75 trials based on historical data. This approach generated 307 when all elements are taken into account. ROI was 300% greater

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Microsoft
• Hack Day
• UM
• UM London
• Universal McCann
• Last.fm
• Visual Studio
• coder
• computer
• technology