Aw c'mon...charity is not an acceptable marketing strategy!..or is it?
Redmond , seriously. At first you just really disappointed me with this , but maybe I missed something. The "i'm making a difference" campaign basically promises to give a portion of advertising revenue from targeted ads to a few large, worthy charitable causes. Users of Windows Live can even identify themselves as being aligned with a particular charity. My first reaction was amusement to mild annoyance at the marketing. My knee-jerk reaction was that this was a stupid way for MSN to gain share in a market it was probably not doing well. I didn't think it appealed to too many people (they seem to target tweens/teens) and wasn't sustainable. It just seemed kinda cheesy too. But a quick look at IM stats, indicates that MSN actually does really well in the instant message market on the PC. So this is a way to increase share in what is quite a mature market (i.e. the best case is that its growing at the rate of the population) and to catch em young. In marketing t...