DigiTales & Other Stories

Having posted the Microsoft Context Matters Funeral, Dance and Art videos on my blog over the last few days, they’ve now been viewed through MSN Video by over 1500 marketers around the world so far.

Some people loved them, some people didn’t! Some people were confused as to the message they were giving out, and some people even thought they were a little inappropriate.

Most though, were willing to wait to see them put into context before making a judgement.

As any marketer knows an advert needs some context in order to draw an audience in, and none more so than online.

So our research guys here at Microsoft have collaborated with MEC Interaction in order to delve much deeper into how users connect with internet advertising.

What they found was that time, place, mood and motivation play a significant role in how impactful your advertising message can be.

Key objectives were:

•      To delve beyond the “time spent” measure
•      To identify and describe key online “occasions” and their contexts
•      To examine advertising fit across these occasions
•      To help our partners optimise their online media planning

Identifying the “online occasions” as being entertainment, creation, communication, transaction, information and general surfing, the research shows the different ways in which we are willing to accept “pull” mechanisms, or advertising where we may be asked to interact with it, or “push” messaging , where we’re too busy to connect but are susceptible to the branding effect.

There’s a load of info in the report about what percentage of time people are multi-tasking, home versus work, week versus weekend, and some specific quotes and case studies.

There are even stats on what mood people are more likely to be in at various times of the day, and how focused they are likely to be while performing certain actions during these occasions!

Now the concept of “context” in planning your marketing strategy is not a new one, however no one has done as an indepth study of how consumers behave online across the ever-expanding, multi-channel opportunity that we have through the internet.

So whether you’re a search marketer, a display planner/buyer, you’re into email marketing or are just plain curious, you can check out the Context Matters page on our advertising site and download the 11 page report from there as it’s well worth a peek:

Context  Matters – Microsoft Internet Marketing Research Report

And now let’s hear it for those videos now I’ve put them in context