Whoa, the personal hovercraft in this new ad for Microsoft's souped-up Outlook.com email service is awesome! Look at it go—va-room! The spot, from Deutsch in New York, works hard to succinctly present Outlook's suite of features, like social-network integration and the ability to sweep extraneous missives (like ads?) from one's inbox. And Microsoft certainly has an ambitious agenda for Outlook.com—it's gone from zero to 60 million users in six months, and the company says it's "ready to scale to a billion people." (Hotmail users can switch instantaneously.) Yet there's an element of overreaching at play here. Even with all these bells and whistles, we're ultimately talking about email here—as much as it wants to be, it's not the digital hub of most people's lives. It reminds me of last year's high-concept U.K. commercial for Google+, which suggested people would share and store every element of their earthly existence there, when we all know that, at best, they just Hangout there occasionally. The Outlook.com extras are nice, but ultimately it's a messaging system, and if that functionality works, that's really all anyone cares about. Will it siphon users from Gmail? Only if it comes with that hovercraft. Credits below.
CREDITS
Agency: Deutsch, New York
Partner, Chief Creative Officer: Greg DiNoto
Group Creative Director: Paul Kekalos
Associate Creative Directors: Luke Hughett, Sean Lee
Senior Copywriter: Lee Tone
Interactive Art Director: Roxy Feldman
Senior Vice President, Director of Broadcast Production: Joe Calabrese
Senior Producer: Jenny Hile
Client: Microsoft
Senior Director, Product Management, Marketing: Dharmesh Mehta
Production Company: Anonymous Content
Director: Malcolm Venville
Director of Photography: Paul Cameron
Executive Producer: Eric Stern
Line Producer: John Benet
Assistant Director: Bob Wagner
Editorial: PS 260
Editors: J.J. Lask, Maury Loeb
Assistant Editors): Colin Edelman, Matt Posey
Senior Producer: Laura Patterson
Executive Producer: Zarina Mak
Color Correction Facility: Nice Shoes
Colorist: Chris Ryan
Online Facility: Absolute Post
Online Editor: Morgane Furio
Visual Effects Company: 8VFX
Musician: Macklemore
Song: "Can't Hold Us"
Music, Licensed Music Tracks:
Composers: Ben Haggerty, Ryan Lewis
Author (Lyrics): Ben Haggerty
Producer: Ryan Lewis
Audio Post Company: Sound Lounge
Engineer: Tom Jacarone
Shoot Location: Los Angeles
