On Wednesday, a whole batch of Projectliners and I headed to the Washington Athletic Club (aka the WAC) for this month’s PSAMA luncheon. We were sponsoring, so there was setup and networking to do. We had a great time and counted it a resounding success. But the best evidence that it was a successful event is the fact that I just can’t stop thinking about the presentation.

The speakers were Jerry Hayek, Group Marketing Manager at Microsoft, and Brian Donaldson, Group Account Director at Wunderman. They walked us through this year’s Office 2010 launch, starting with the traditional launch activities and winding up with an in-depth discussion of a more targeted campaign to reach technical influencers. Launches are so multifaceted and complex that it was interesting to see the full story, but Donaldson’s in-depth exploration of one piece is what I’m still thinking about.

Essentially, Wunderman was asked to reach technical influencers and create excitement about Office 2010. Their target audience was not Technical Decision Makers, but the people who would hound them to upgrade; the PC support specialists, network engineers, and developers they trust to let them know what their companies need to be more effective. At the luncheon, Donaldson did a great job of walking us through the thought process: they defined their target audience as “IT and developers” and then delved into what makes that audience tick.

What they found was somewhere between message board community 4Chan and the TV show LOST. In response, they developed a campaign around a fictional company, a fictional website, and a lot of wonderfully silly videos. It’s creative, thorough, and really well conceived. For Wunderman, for Microsoft’s marketing, legal, and PR teams—and for the marketers in the room at the WAC—it was a tremendous stretch beyond normal marketing activities and messages.

To me, the most compelling part of the presentation was Donaldson’s and Hayek’s candidness about the results. In short, the campaign did well. It achieved much of what they expected from it by creating conversation and increasing respect for Microsoft’s cleverness and sense of humor (which might seem minor—unless you’re friends with any actual nerds, in which case you understand that it’s quite a feat). But it seems to me that a campaign of this creativity and thoughtfulness should have soared…which is why I keep thinking about it.

My conclusion? It can be tempting to think about people who are different from us in somewhat broad categories—hence, defining target audiences using terms like “techies,” “entrepreneurs,” or even “people who want to buy our products/services.” (Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t used that last one even once, at least in jest.) The problem is that those people don’t see themselves in such large groups, because they don’t define themselves in opposition to us—they define themselves in opposition to each other.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, I think it’s quite possible that by lumping together IT and developers, this campaign just barely missed hitting the perfect nerve with either. IT workers have really different frustrations, priorities, and ways of thinking about themselves than developers. In turn, developers have different concerns, annoyances, and interactions than IT departments (with the possible exception of in-house developers, where there might be more overlap).

How could this campaign have hit one or both of those sweet spots? Based on the presenters’ insightful recap, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Segment and then segment some more. Just because a group is different from me (as a marketer, as a Seattleite, or whatever category is relevant) doesn’t mean it sees itself as one group. People often define themselves in opposition to other people who are the most similar to them, so mining those differences can be a rich source of humor and connection.
• Think about what you want people to do. Wunderman and Microsoft wound up making the campaign so clever that it was confusing to a lot of viewers. The puzzle was so good that not very many people made it to the solution. The “solution” in this case was that Office 2010 would make their lives easier and that they should be interested and excited about Microsoft’s upcoming software. It wouldn’t be so bad to have people blogging the pathways to that solution, sharing the tricks, and making it all the way through the puzzles to the end.
• An ongoing content plan can help keep things on track. In this case, it might have helped to have some contingency plans: hints ready to go out when people got stuck, additional content to keep people engaged when they got frustrated or bored, and rewards to add incentives if needed. Knowing how to respond by “herding” your readers when they don’t respond how you’d hoped could really help keep them on track.

Thanks, PSAMA, for putting on such a wonderful event. And thanks to Jerry Hayek and Brian Donaldson for such a thought-provoking presentation. I’m looking forward to the next luncheon!