Microsoft: A Play on the Modern Office

Microsoft was launching Office 365 for Enterprises in Myanmar and had one event, with its regional leadership present, to appeal to business customers and inspire sales. Cloud-based productivity was an abstract idea for many of the country's business decision makers.

The target audience skewed older and traditional, and would not be moved by a feature demonstration. Microsoft needed the event to make the difference between the old office and the modern office felt, in a format the audience would enjoy and remember.

Ruder Finn Era, then ERA Communications, wrote a play. The script dramatised the woes of the traditional office against the ease of the modern one, a storytelling form that appealed to an older business audience and made the product benefits human rather than technical.

The team divided one day at a hotel between media and stakeholder sessions, and designed an interactive experience at the venue so that every guest could try the key messages of the cloud for themselves. The play, the experience and the regional leadership's presence gave both journalists and customers a story to tell about what the modern office looks like.