David Pugh-Jones Favorite Brand Experiences: Mars and Dark Knight
David Pugh-Jones | Creative Strategist EMEA
Microsoft Advertising 
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David Pugh Jones is known for helping redefine Microsoft’s ability to push brand experiences in situ, such as MSN Skins.  Â
When asked for thoughts on clever digital campaigns that really got his juices flowing beyond banners and buttons, David comments on an ongoing assault of the digital senses in relation to a chocolate campaign and one recent movie release…
Your perfect working day:   I am an early bird and I do my best work in the morning. Not just because the office is quiet. I do my best thinking before the other teams pour in.   The perfect day would be if an agency came with a nice healthy client and said ‘we want to push the creative boundaries on-line… we want to do something that is going to show us an innovator.
What needs to be changed/improved in order to achieve ultimate engagement with users? For on-line advertising improve several things need to happen. First, to build up engagement with users, we need to build two-way interaction with the consumer – by creating questions and getting users to respond to products and information. If users become part of that brand and if they enjoy getting more information, they will start sharing it with their friends – that is why social marketing is so amazing. On YouTube and MSN Video – you see so much content being shared – if it is quirky, clever, informative, We can no longer run advertising that doesn’t give anything back to the user. The fundamental key is the brand experience. Digital is where it’s at. This is the environment where consumers are starting to tell us what they want.
Favorite Brand Experience: One was a campaign that we worked on closely with Eyeblaster called Mars Planets. It was a great campaign for a number of reasons - primarily because it wasn’t us just responding to a brief. We were involved as early as possible in all aspects of the campaign - TV advertising, outdoor – they came to us right away. We came up with the idea of ‘consumers responding to Mars.’ In a one day home page takeover of the MSN-UK Home Page, 35,000 people signed up to enter the competition to win the chocolate. The priority was getting people to see the brand – it wasn’t about the click rate – I don’t even know what it was. The idea was engaging users to share with the brand. The great thing about it was that it wasn’t one mass TV spend and then online was an afterthought; online was paramount to it working.
One other fantastic campaign that I worked on was the launch of the movie Dark Night. When you went to the movie’s ‘official’ website, you were greeted with the familiar bat logo, and nothing more. But if you clicked on the logo, you were taken to the site http://www.ibelieveinharveydent.com/ When the site  came up, with a ‘vandalized’ logo it appears that Batman’s old nemesis The Joker has been at work. With this site, users entered their email address, and were sent the x,y coordinates of one pixel, 
and a new link where they could enter in the email’s coordinates, and remove one pixel on the image, revealing a bit of the image underneath. However, the users could only get one pixel per email address, so they needed help from their friends to see what image is underneath. This is where the viral component comes in, as everyone works together sharing coordinates, until the image underneath finally confirms suspicions that The Joker has been up to no good. It was a breakthrough marketing brand experience.
