T H E A S K
Microsoft wanted to create a pool of corporate speakers and subject matter experts -ones who could address audiences at various corporate events. As a first step, they wanted employees with the right profile to come forward and nominate themselves.
C U T T O T H E C O R P O R A T E W O R L D . . .
The image of the Storyteller hardly ever coincides with that of the ‘Corporate Speaker’.
What he does almost never qualifies as storytelling. Instead it’s reduced to some dry, official-sounding phrase like ‘seminar’, ‘presentation’ or ‘keynote speech’. And they all have a stiff, formal quality about them.
And it’s this ‘Seriousness’, this cold formality, that puts off a lot of people from wanting to take the stage and talk.
O U R A P P R O A C H
Our aim was to displace the term ‘Speaker’ with ‘Storyteller’.
And to achieve that, we wanted to create an aura around the figure of the Storyteller. We wanted to romanticize him. We wanted to evoke the sense of wonder, of magic, that accompanies a storytelling session. Above all, we wanted to touch upon the enormous power and influence that the storyteller wields.
We called the campaign 'Microsoft Storytellers'.
A creative from the teaser phase:
The emailer introducing the initiative:
