In end of Day 2 of Mix ’07 there was this keynote by Robbie Bach – President, Entertainment & Mobile Division Microsoft. He highlighted on the following:
- Connected Entertainment is all about Personal, Interactive & Social
- He talked about how to Attract, Engage and Excite to do a sale with your customer
- XBox has over 10 Million Boxes sold, XBox Live has over 6 million users – primarily because they want to socialize.
- Windows Media PCs are over 30 Million out there
- He showed some cool demos like
- On how Burger King decided to build 3 specific branded games on XBox and sold it for $3.99 over 3 Million copies. This helped their brand to available for a longer immersive fashion for the young target audience
- With Microsoft aquiring “Massive In-Game Ads” they now have over 100 titles with over 60 Advertisers
- DisneyLand HongKong which wanted to target the Main land online users make them aware of Disney as a brand, went to partenr with OEMs in China to pre-install Vista Gadgets (which saves download over broad-band) that provides various options – trailers, games, etc.
- Microsoft themselves say the power of community in a TV Advertisement on “Gears on War” game they posted in XBox Live. It was a violent action video with a melody as background music. Immediately they saw about 700 different (mash-up) versions of it in YouTube and other video sites, downloaded over 5 Million times and the game got sold 4 Million copies or so.
- BBC Radio One talked about their Windows Live Messenger Activity for listening Radio together and social network website.
Panel Discussion – Marketing is Dead, Long Live Marketing
Andrew Rashbass (Publisher and MD of The Economist, a magazine I love) said: 92% of Internet users find context sensitive adverising today is intrusive and if they can they will turn them off. The thumb rule is to sell to 8% of users, you are turning off 92% of users. Market Forces will make many of the traditional media companies to die due to drying up of Advertising money for them, the advertising money is there but not enough for everyone, it is good because it is due to Market forces. Though 30 seconds pre-roll is bad, but since all marketing forces are piling on so it is not available enough. Robbie who talked before now on Marketing was attended by 2000 people, but is losing 300 Million Dollars last year 
. There is always a lean-forward media (Internet), lean-back media (TV) dilemma. I am not sure whether you will get full convergence or whether there will be room for both – may be yes.
In a question on whether they are worried on monopoly in Internet – Andrew said certainly not, google is an example of a good product and market forces, and despite their market penetration there is still tons of choices. The Host in turn added that one new startup gets founded in Silicon Valley every 48 hours now.
In a question on whether the new Portable Reader Devices will replace paper. Andrew said it will not happen in short-term, not in mid-term and definitely not in long-term. Andrew said nothing kills a bad product than over advertising. We can keep of wishing, but nobody is taking. We have the perfect central park, in the bed, in the toilet, in the bath – that is paper. The host added that Bill Gates believes that in the long-term when Devices are portable and foldable it will replace. Andrew countered that BillG can use it, but no one else will use it.
In a question on Bad Ads appearing all the time, Andrew said The best way to reach wide is to interupt and be disruptive and web has made it more interruptive.
Carol Kruse (Group Director, Coca-Cola) said we have killed email due to SPAM, Online is now happening but everyone is promising Mobile will be big. But no one has figured out how to do advertising non-intrusive in your mobile phones – who wants to see Ads in your personal phones?. 30 Seconds Pre-Roll before online videos is bad for consumers.
Winston Binch (Executive Producer, Crispin Porter) said magazine reading is increasing, brochures in-take have increased because you can flip through it and we grew with it. We will have lot of overlaps and interesting campaigns using together.
Jonathan Hsia (Associate Marketing Director, Starcom) in a reply to a question said that Bad Ads like in mySpace appear all the time, SPAM works somehow, but when our customers see a bad ads, they come back.
The first session I was in a SilverLight with .NET framework session that was interesting. The ability to use Scriptable attribute in .net to expose a function from .NET and have it called in JavaScript or respond to a JavaScript event in browser was cool and opens great possibilities in client side coding. They have also exposed HTML DOM inside the .NET code.
