At the start of the initial Microsoft Teams campaign launch in January 2020, our goal was to increase familiarity against our information workers audience. Whilst Microsoft Teams was available and in-market prior to launch, average daily usage and general familiarity of the app was relatively low. After two months in market, the COVID-19 virus hit the US, and we were forced to take a step back, reassess our approach, and adapt our campaign to meet the changing times. While the crisis made Teams more relevant to the information workers audience given the fundamental shift to Work From Home (WFH), we were still tasked with proving use cases and educating information workers on the benefits of Teams. This new climate provided us an opportunity to showcase the benefits of Microsoft Teams as an efficient tool for information workers to increase productivity and achieve their best work. As the crisis wore on, we continued to push agility in the US and across 14 global markets to ensure we were reaching our audiences with the right local messaging, further solidifying the use case and reliability of Microsoft Teams for the future of work. Prior to the campaign start, competitive presence was at a minimum, with Slack and Zoom having little presence in the marketplace. At the onset of our media activity, Teams campaign recognition was at about 26% with our information workers target audience, and 50% of them were familiar with Teams as a productivity tool. (more details in results section)

We worked closely with our clients and m:United to ensure our creative approach evolved as the marketplace and our campaign did throughout the year. Prior to the start of COVID-19, our creative was an overarching message that showcased the general benefits of a productivity and collaboration tool like Teams. Once the pandemic hit, we needed to revisit our approach, now that information workers were made aware of the need for a product like Teams as they shifted to remote work. The messaging shifted to showcase real life use cases of Microsoft Teams, focused on customer stories from essential workers, like St. Luke’s Hospital Network and the London Metropolitan Police Department. These stories outlined how Teams specifically allowed each organization to continue to do the work they needed to throughout an uncertain time. As our campaign went on and we approached the Fall of 2020, we needed to make sure we were continuing to drive not only awareness of the brand but also engagement to keep Teams top of mind. One of the biggest passion points of our information workers audience is sports, and more specifically NFL. Through a partnership with NBC, we worked to create custom content that tangibly showed how Teams helped prepare NBC and the NFL for their broadcasts each week. Fans enthusiastically engaged with the content, which gave a peek behind the scenes with their favorite broadcast personalities and players.

Familiarity is our primary KPI, and we have seen steady growth from the start of our campaign with familiarity now reaching 60% among information workers, a 10% growth from the campaign baseline. The success of our campaign has been proven through consistent growth across our the KPIs. From our most recent client performance readout in March 2021, aided awareness of Teams reached 94% among information workers, with 55% of our target audience saying they “know Teams well.” In terms of business outcome, usage intent has reached 50% among information workers, which is up from 28% the previous year. As of February 2021, total Teams campaign recognition is at 66%, up from 26% the prior year (pre COVID-19). The consistent growth in all our KPIs further proves the success of our campaign strategy to familiarize our entire information workers audience with the app and position Teams as a leader in the space.