Microsoft will take the virtual stage at the Cannes Lions this year to accept the honor of Creative Marketer of the Year, the annual award presented to an advertiser who has consistently created award-winning, standout ideas that drive business. 

While the brand historically has produced Lion-grabbing work across its suite of products, it was undeterred during the pandemic and continued to turn out campaigns that broke through. With agency McCann, for example, it illustrated how Microsoft Teams served as the “first responder to the first responders” in spots highlighting how the platform helped the police, frontline workers and moms carry on with their jobs. It also worked with sports organizations like the NBA and the NFL to brings fans closer to the game when COVID-19 kept them away from the stadiums. While an unusual "reboxing" push united Xbox players across generations. 

Ad Age spoke with Kathleen Hall, Microsoft's chief brand officer, about the Creative Marketer of the Year honor, what it takes to consistently create innovative advertising ideas that move business, and how to nurture a fruitful client-agency relationship. 

You’ve been at Microsoft for nearly 13 years now. What was the lay of the land when you got there?

The company realized it needed strong marketing muscle to compliment its engineering capability. The emotional connection people had with this brand blew me away early on, and I found what you need to do great work is a great brand truth, a real product truth, a clarity of values and vision, which was really beginning to gel at the time.

So what, over time, have you been able to do?

I think we shifted the paradigm for the category, where tech, for the longest time, was about the shiny thing. We flipped it to being about the amazing things people do with our things. We turned the lens around and I think that’s what really differentiated us. There’s a credibility in letting people speak their own truth versus a company putting out their own POV. Back in the day, you weren’t necessarily proud of being a PC user because Apple did a great campaign. And we had to do a “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”-type makeover for that. It’s terrible to be positioned by default, so we stood up for who we are.

Does creativity work?

Creativity and storytelling at their best resonate with people because they connect with some truth—a social truth, a product truth, an emotional truth. The more you add to that, the better the connection it is. First and foremost, the early impact of creativity was that it rallied the company itself. We had a Super Bowl spot [in 2014] starring Steve Gleason [created out of Blk-Ops] that showed what our technology could do. That was a tech spot, but I can’t even tell you how many employee emails I got saying "thank you for representing the company I’ve always known." The engineers and people who make our products are very creative. I’m not capable of writing code and they can’t make commercials. We’re using our skills to tell their stories.

Some of the stories you’ve told have been unexpected. You had great success with the Adaptive Controller and the campaign around it, both of which earned top honors at Cannes, yet that product isn’t your “biggest” on the shelves.

We are constantly looking for uncovered stories and gems that represent our values and truths. It’s not always the biggest business product that best represents your stories and values. It’s sometimes these outlying, seemingly small, activities and initiatives. That’s what the controller was. The initiative and the development of that product came from an internal hackathon. With the ads, that started with a holiday spot and we were going to shoot B-roll with some of the parents. We were freezing our butts off and nobody wanted to shoot it, but as I was sitting there listening to these parents, it was like, “Holy Shit, this is amazing. I think we have our Super Bowl spot.” It was a happy accident.

Is there a culture, an approach that enables all this fluidity?

I think what that all represents is that there is an amazing close partnership with our agency McCann and a lot of clarity around our vision, and a lot of freedom to tell the stories we need to tell. There’s not a lot of bureaucracy around “can this happen or not.” If we believe in it, Chris [Capossela] our chief marketing officer is going to go with it. There’s a lot of trust. It’s not just marketing, of course. It’s the alignment of marketing and management. Satya [Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO], is an amazing supporter and he himself is a great storyteller, understands the value of great storytelling and the emotional connecction with consumers. Those two giant streams came into alignment over the last 10 years, which is what’s driven a lot of this success.

How do you ensure a productive, fruitful relationship with your agencies? You've worked with a number of them over the years, CPB and Blk-Ops—which led to the "Empowering Us All" platform, and McCann, which has been behind many of the big Cannes winners.

It’s like a people relationship. There’s a lot of honesty. They make fun of me. From a creative standpoint, directness and clarity are paramount. You can’t be equivocal about your strategy. It’s not magic. It’s not an epiphany. We’re miners and we’re down there, digging and inhaling a lot of crap, and then, eventually, we uncover the diamonds. With the agency, it’s like a good marriage. If I have a problem, I pick up the phone and call Sean [Bryan, co-CCO, North America] or I would call Rob [Reilly, former McCann Worldgroup creative chairman, who has since moved to WPP]. There’s an openness. Rob was a believer before I came on board, and he’s never wavered from his belief in the company’s greatness and that it deserves to be recognized for it.

What are your plans now that Rob’s taken the creative helm at WPP?

We’ve been working together for a lot of years and Rob’s love for, and commitment to, the Microsoft brand was bar none. But the opportunity he had to move on is a fabulous one and you never want any of your friends to limit themselves to your benefit. But I think the good news is that Rob passed on his love for, and knowledge of, Microsoft to a really strong team, so we have a really super strong team in place carrying on his tradition. But, personally, I’ll miss him a ton.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you approached marketing over the past year? From you, we saw a lot of interesting ideas, specifically around a product, Teams, that became more relevant because of lockdown.

The first week of March we shut down, and we had a shoot schedule the following Monday for Teams, so we were like, what do we do? Right away we went to—oh my gosh, maybe the medium is the message. We could actually shoot over Teams. It seems so obvious now, but back then, no one was doing it yet. Some of it was a nightmare. We used real people, it was raw and down and dirty, but what we learned was good idea is good messaging. You don’t always need high production to get them across. 

You had the Mother’s Day spot featuring all the moms at work, but distracted by their kids, and you also pulled various clients into an ad.

It was the London Metro Police, L’Oréal and St. Luke’s Medical Center. We tried to pick an industry and geography representation of people because we’re in a lot of markets. To quote Satya, “we’re kind of the first responders to the first responders. [The pandemic] accelerated digital transformation in a way we’ve never seen. What this taught us pretty quickly is that there is a lot we can do digitally, a lot we can do remotely, and still crank out great ideas and great execution. I don’t think there’s a replacement for the energy of being together, but I’ve been amazed by what we can accomplish virtually.

Do you have a proudest moment of the past year in terms of the marketing?

It’s a tie for me between the two we just talked about. The first Teams spot really showed “we can do this,” with companies picking up their bootstraps, police protecting people and medical officers doing 15 times the visits. And then the moms one. I have a lot of women on the team, I’m a mom, and the reality of what was going on when we were trying to manage this stuff of the —it was just so true. Great creative is always built on a universal truth. A lot of those were our real meetings with our real team. We basically started recording meetings and we said we were gonna dump all those on the agency and they could use whatever they wanted. The stuff that was happening was happening. It was crazy town. 

Another remarkable thing Microsoft was involved in was with sports organizations like the NBA and NFL.

Yes, those are high on the list too. The NFL Draft and NBA "Courtside" were pretty high on my list too because we helped partners facilitate continuing fan engagement, which was so important to both them and the morale of people. For the NFL Draft, we helped them humanize the characters—the football players in their homes and the commissioner in his man cave. Both for the NFL and NBA, that wasn’t a big part of our tech partnership; it was just something we knew they needed help with and we jumped in to do. 

Did working through the pandemic teach you anything you think you’ll apply to how you think and create moving forward?

I think it reinforced very strongly something I already knew, and that is, there’s no substitute for a good idea. It’s not about who’s the magical director we can get or how much postproduction work we can do. It’s like the Mother’s Day spot. When you have an idea that’s strong, you don’t need all the magic whiz-bang stuff. The power of a good idea still rules.