Microsoft Pushes XP Online
By David Martin, Marc Ryan

Content with your current operating system? Microsoft has 200 million reasons why you should upgrade to their new Windows XP platform. While a deep marketing budget has television and print advertisements peppering consumers during prime time TV and in glitzy magazines, substantial chunks of the software behemoth's resources are being devoted to pushing the new platform online. Subsequently, Microsoft XP is meeting and beating the volume average of the top online promoters.

Interrupted by the events surrounding September 11th, Microsoft quickly accelerated their online campaign toward the end of the month and in the beginning of October. To date, Windows XP online advertising has seen a cumulative volume of more than half a billion impressions. Put into perspective, this campaign dwarfs any Windows-related online campaign run by Microsoft in the last 18 months. Compared to the top 100 online advertisers, including mammoth in-house promoters like AOL Time Warner, Microsoft XP's weekly volume has kept pace. Compared to all online advertisers each week, Microsoft's campaign for Windows XP is roughly thirty times the average. Compared to only the software industry, Windows XP online advertising in the last five weeks has taken Microsoft from an eight percent share of market to a 30 percent share, and put them second in the industry behind ads for Netscape.

Traffic Builds on XP Promotional Sites

A major focus of Microsoft's online campaign is to drive traffic to Windows XP promotional sites, where users register to win prizes such as computers and free software. Banners tout a contest where 50 people will win a Sony computer and free software upgrades for life, driving users to www.windowsxppromo.com and www.windowsxpinstantwin.com.

In the month of September, windowsxppromo.com broke into the Media Metrix Top 1000 web properties rankings. More recent projections for the week ending October 14th showed windowsxpinstantwin.com with 269 thousand unique visitors. During the week previous to that, windowsxppromo.com registered nearly half a million unique visitors, suggesting the effectiveness of their incentive push.

Ads Reach a Middle-Age, Middle-Class Audience

Computer operating systems span all demographics in use, and it would seem logical that Microsoft would choose to blanket the widest demographic as possible with their ad campaign. Between September 10th and October 15th, Windows XP online ads reached males nearly 63 percent of the time and females about 37 percent. Within those gender breaks, people between the ages of 25 to 54--a split roughly representative of the American workforce--were the biggest audience.

While household income splits were very even, households earning between $40 thousand and $50 thousand a year comprised the largest ad audience at 24 percent. There was also bias away from households pulling in less than $25 thousand per year. In terms of household size, there was a clear dominance by households with two people, which comprised exactly one third of the Windows XP ad audience between the tenth of September and the fifteenth of October. Extremely large households, those with five or more people, saw Windows XP ads the least, composing barely more than 12 percent of the audience.

Promotions Mainly 'In-House'

Leveraging the high reach of their own websites, Microsoft has the ability to conduct an unlimited marketing blitz. With ownership of the second, fourth, sixth, and seventh ranked websites on the Internet, there is little reason to spend money anywhere else. The bulk of Windows XP advertising has been found on the MSN domain, which reaches 60 percent of all online users. Three percent of their campaign is on joint-venture site MSNBC.com, which reaches over 20 million unique visitors per month.

While their own websites are an obvious place to advertise, the use and misuse of house advertising is an ongoing debate in the online advertising world. In many cases, a high level of in-house advertising can be indicative of a high level of ad element clutter on a web site. Clutter can potentially diminish the return on a paying advertiser's investment by drowning out ads, in turn lowering the demand for online advertising.

In the case of companies with large media properties, in-house advertising can be a highly effective way to communicate with potential customers. AOL Time Warner, the subject of a previous AdRelevance Snapshot, has used the breadth and expanse of its online domains to inform and drive 'pre-qualified' traffic to their other outlets. With Windows XP reportedly the most Internet-integrated operating system to date, it only makes sense for Microsoft to bombard MSN users with XP advertising. While the effectiveness of that advertising will be measured in sales of the product, in the meantime we can look to the performance of their direct marketing push in terms of unique visitors to their websites. Early analysis: its paying off.