Agility Campaign Puts Focus on .NET

Microsoft is tightening the link between .NET and its own name with a US$200 million advertising campaign associating .NET with the Microsoft brand. Building on the company’s “Agility” campaign, the new “One Degree of Separation” advertising is the first mass-market campaign to mention .NET. The campaign could reduce confusion about what .NET is designed to accomplish, and it could also help Microsoft partners piggyback on the .NET branding to promote their own services.

The company plans to target television, print, magazines, and Web sites with the campaign, which kicked off with television advertising on Feb. 18 and will run at least until the end of the company’s fiscal year, June 30.

.NET Tied to Flexibility, Speed

The new campaign positions .NET as Microsoft’s solution for tightly integrated applications that can respond rapidly to changing customer tastes, and also as a way to build enterprise applications when rapid time-to-market is important. The new ads are snappier and less technical than the ponderous ads in the first Agility campaign in early 2001, which aimed to convince enterprises that Microsoft deserved a place in the data center along with other software heavyweights. (See “Business Agility Campaign Launched” on page 26 of the Mar. 2001 Update.)