During the recent holiday season, Microsoft asked Assembly to help them engage with their target audience in an impactful and unique way. In the middle of a noisy season, Microsoft set out to inspire creativity, spark excitement within their core demographic and build goodwill towards the brand during an extremely stressful time of year. In partnership, Assembly and Microsoft created the Center for Out of Office Excellence (CFOOOE)—a resource for consumers to create and share personalized Out of Office messages.
We tracked success through total site impressions, click and actions, photo entries on the site, related article views, Outlook downloads, target audience conversation sentiment, and percent engagement amongst our target audience.
The traditional Out of Office (OOO) message, by its very (professional) nature, discourages self-expression and dampers enthusiasm. Its rigid form belies notions of escape and adventure. In order to transform the OOO into something that celebrates that moment of joy when you sign off for vacation—we created the CFOOOE.
From Microsoft, the originator of the OOO, the CFOOOE was a resource, launched prior to the holiday season that allowed everyday people to share how they really felt about heading out over the holidays. A simple interface made it easy to customize a very visual OOO message, share it—and go.
Assembly built and designed an easy-to-use landing experience, targeted and paid social posts, banner advertising, and supporting articles that allowed consumers to share, learn more, and download Outlook for free. Assembly built the guiding strategy for the CFOOE and executed paid promotion of the site.
Over the course of three weeks, the CFOOE garnered huge success:
* 12,764,868 total impressions
* 143,314 clicks to the CFOOOE landing page
* 132,280 actions on the page
* 8,640 clicks to upload an OOO message
* 4,051 clicks to share an OOO message, with a 47% conversion rate from photo upload to share
* 1,792 clicks to download Outlook
* 46% engagement within our preferred target female audience
