Global Communications

Microsoft global communications was a little bit hard to find. I decided to do a different approach. The first thing I did with the Microsoft global communications was to look up their most recent global campaign. The called is the "Start Something" campaign. It launched for 15 months in April 2005. The campaign was designed as a "global awareness campaign designed to showcase to people how to explore, enhance, and pursue their passions." They encouraged people to explore their talents and passions by using the Windows XP software as well as other Microsoft technologies. This campaign ran in the following 11 different countries: United States (first ones to launch it) Australia, Canada, India, Korea, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. They showcased 13 different passions such as: art, music, sports, productivity, entrepreneurship, photography, education, and science.  In order to get the the campaign out there Microsoft had: 51 Television ads, 39 Print Ads, and 250 online ads. All of these we re featured globally.

I found this campaign somewhat off setting. I guess the thing that threw me was the fact that they did a competition to see who would use the products the the best while they were "starting something". But all the winners were American. I don't know if this is because is because each country did their own competition or if it was just in America; but nothing else came up in the search.

The second thing I did to explore Microsoft Worldwide was do a visual comparison of 3 different countries compared the United States. I picked the webpage for  Microsoft Italy, Microsoft Australia, and Microsoft Japan. I figured this would give me a wide range of how it's different around the world. The interesting thing to me was that the 3 websites were behind on appearance - I would say their website looked as what we were used to seeing back in to 2007.  Also on the Italian website they advertised two different products that weren't found on the other three. They advertised for a Zune (which living in Italy for four months I know is more popular than the iPod) as well as the services for Cloud was advertised right on the website. Lastly, both Australia and Japan had links to donate money for disaster relief unlike America and Italy.