Role Strategist
Agency POSSIBLE
Brand Microsoft OneNote
Project “The Collective Project” Campaign
Date Winter 2015
In the beginning of 2015, I was put on a fast-paced, three-month long campaign and activation on my second day on the job at POSSIBLE, Seattle after having moved across the country a week prior from New York City.
OneNote, a note taking app from Microsoft, needed to capture the next generation of Office users, college students who were notoriously averse to marketing. With the overall strategy set at the project pitch, I was tasked with leading the day-to-day strategy of the campaign. My role was to brief creatives, choose and brief influencers, coordinate media and social strategy including events, paid media and content.
But no two days were the same with everything in real time, anchored by three on-campus events. We were tasked with inventing the wheel, having no playbook - just a dedicated war room and an eager group of collaborative strategists, creatives, account, project management, media and clients eager to make an impact.
I learned that even the seemingly small decisions could have an outsized impact. Towards the end of the campaign, our lead account director scored a huge win when Robert Downey Jr. offered to support one of the charities we were putting a spotlight on with the campaign, allowing us to film him hand delivering a 3-D printed bionic arm to a boy who needed it - making many dreams come true. The unscripted delivery turned into a key piece of content that Microsoft was excited to use as part of the campaign. As a mechanism of the campaign, impressions on our campaign and OneNote meant impressions and attention to the 3-D printing non-profit.
Our clients felt it was only natural to host and release the video on Microsoft’s YouTube page as was conventional wisdom that YouTube content could “go viral.” Upon learning this, our social strategist raised the alarms that this would not be authentic, a foundational value of the campaign. Together, we made the case for releasing the video on Robert Downey Jr.’s Facebook page, a platform that, due to it heavily being private shares from one friend to another, hadn’t had a history of creating viral content.
The rest is history. The video went viral, gracing news outlets and social feeds throughout the country. We surpassed our clients’ goals, won the agency’s first Cannes and as I’m sure many of my colleagues will agree, most proudly brought attention to student-run causes highlighted in the campaign.
I am most proud of this project, not because we won a bunch of awards, but because it was truly a collaborative effort where everyone had a voice, listened to one another and contributed to the project’s success.