I’ve done two projects with Microsoft. The first was when they brought on the Damn Joan team to revamp their In Culture website, and help them tell a connected story that would reach millennial women. With a key finding that millennials are often intimidated and discouraged by traditional “success stories,” we created a storytelling template around journeys, moments, and strategies, with less emphasis on endpoints and achievements. This process-based strategy also allowed Microsoft’s products to show up in narratives as creative tools and problem-solving solutions.

For the second project, several years later, I worked with Microsoft’s their in-house creative team to create a series of videos intended to push out messaging to their global sales force. We went further, also making toolkits, how-tos, and gifs—this deepened both reach and impact by allowing the comms team to distribute the messaging to every touchpoint, including the internal sales platform.

One thing that absolutely blew my mind was the Microsoft Turkey team, who had created a 360• experience for their retail clients, leveraging AI to improve online shopping and in-store service, optimize inventory tracking, pricing, and operations, advise on marketing strategies, upgrade supply chain control, and more. They had planned to launch at a big trade conference in the spring of 2020, and when COVID shut that down, they created a VR representation of all the capabilities and put it online. The work I did profiling them and creating assets to share their insights is proprietary and I realize this all sounds very nerdy but it’s so cool! Here is the English version of their site.