Smartphone Thoughts: Talking with John Starkweather of MED Division at Microsoft - Part 2

Mike: I guess going forward, advertising is a big issue that we don’t see in the Windows Mobile arena, but we do see in places where you have 95% of the market, like XP and everything else. We’re still used to seeing magazines, even though you dominate the market, you still see page ads and that, and the odd commercials and everything else. Is Windows Mobile going to take on that force? Obviously mobility is the future – all the stats show that youth are adopting this like crazy. Marketing in this area certainly should be a key focus to help get your brand out there and help make people aware.

John: Yep. So, marketing is definitely important. It’s the group I belong to, and we take it very, very seriously. For your first question about actual advertising, this year we had our largest to date, campaign that was really focused more on the person who is going to use a device, who also has a job that may use email, that may use Outlook, that may use other applications. We put a lot of money behind that, and next year, we’re actually taking the dollar figure up about five times. The amounts are significant – we’re talking lots of digits.

Mike: So, as your market share is increasing, you’re increasing your marketing/advertising budget.

John: Yeah, exactly, and the advertising I’m talking about is strictly Windows Mobile advertising. You’ve seen it online where you’ve got difference devices, a couple of little tag lines, “That weight on your shoulder is actually weight” is one of the tag lines, “Does your office know about this?”, “You’re able to do lots of things…” – lots of catchy little tag lines. We’re increasing this exponentially next year. Also, there’s a lot of stuff that you don’t necessarily see that we do with operators. So, we put money behind a lot of advertisers, like Palm. Take the Palm Treo for example – stuff you saw from Verizon, there were ads during Superbowl, and we had some branding in there. We were part of a lot of that. We have, around the world, a lot of operators. We do this with operators who can commit to, and are serious about selling lots of devices. Slowly moving forward, you’ll also see that kind of advertising and marketing expand into more consumer types of things. We’ve really felt, and this is no secret, that the low hanging fruit for us to sell a lot of devices is to business customers who already use Outlook. There are 400+ million Outlook users out there. There are, arguably, almost that many customers using Exchange, or Small Business Server, or Hotmail. We need to go and sell to them. So, the subtleties will change next year. You’ll see some more with MSN Properties, Hotmail, for example, is one. There are a couple of operators in Europe who have gone in and actually sold their products based solely on, “Here’s your MSN phone,” because you can go in immediately, and you’ve got Hotmail, you’ve got an offline client, you’ve got a good IM client – all these other things. Then you’ll see other operators like VodaPhone, and they’re gonna push a lot more on consumer, and they’re gonna do it with Windows Mobile. So while underneath the hood, you’ve got Exchange and ActiveSync and VPNing, and a bunch of those kinds of things, they’re going to push Windows Media Player. So will T-Mobile. T-Mobile’s going to push it in a really big way. T-Mobile’s had a music source in Germany and a few other countries in Europe, and they’ve been public about that, about rolling this out in other places. And they’ve been doing that with Windows Mobile devices. And then we have Windows Media DRM, the back end…. So, you’re going to see that kind of consumer stuff happen while we’ll slowly move our sole Windows Mobile advertising in that direction with time. Does that sort of answer your question? We could talk a long time about marketing. There are a lot of things we’re doing with operators – going in and doing joint sales, and most of those are business customers, I don’t know if that interests you…