At the Cannes Lions 2012 advertising festival, Microsoft Advertising hosted an interview with Chris Capossela, newly promoted Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft, to talk about his “Device Love” keynote at the event which outlines how Microsoft is thinking about marketing across its platforms and its experiences with successes recently, notably Smoked by Windows Phone.

Beyond what Microsoft is currently capable of and is doing, Chris also had the chance to tease a little bit of the thinking behind the upcoming marketing campaign for the launch of Windows 8 and how it will differ to previous Windows marketing campaigns. The two buzzwords to watch out for are “chapter” and “romance”.

My transcription from the video:

Interviewer: Is there any different we’re going to market that (Windows 8) than we did Windows 7?

Chris Caposella: Well I think we’ll talk more directly to consumers from Microsoft.

In the past we’ve done a bunch of Windows advertising but we want to be more consistent with our message, we want to be on longer as opposed to just being a seasonal burst and then we might go quiet.

We’d rather have a more present conversation with people through our marketing and I think we’ll want to romance many chapters of the Windows 8 story, not just you know the operating system – there’s so much that has gone into Windows 8.

Our hardware partners are building incredibly beautiful hardware. We’re going to build some hardware. The applications that will be built will be another chapter for us to romance. The cloud is a really interesting chapter for us to romance.

So I think we have a richer story that we want to communicate directly to consumers on a multi-year basis, as opposed to thinking about it as “what’s the holiday campaign going to be?”. Those days are over. We want to think about a longer, more consistent dialog that has multiple chapters to it.

It sounds like instead of short but powerful burst campaigns like “Life without walls” and “Windows 7 was my idea“, Microsoft will be moving towards a more continuous pattern which promotes frequency over a longer period of time.

I think Apple’s current marketing strategy is a great example of this – there is an iPad ad almost every other time I watch network TV or a movie screening, constantly reminding me of the product and its functionality. Apple also spices it up with new variations of the ad every few months so it’s less repetitive.

I just hope for everyone’s sake when Chris is talking about “multi-chapter” and “romance”, he isn’t thinking of the Twilight series.

Microsoft has been brainstorming with top creative agencies around the world on how to make ads in Windows 8 Metro apps look and feel much slicker. During the week of Cannes Lions 2012 advertising conference, Microsoft is showing the first of many concepts it hopes to share in the coming months.

Up until now, the Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8 (in technical preview) has allowed developers to embed standard text, image and video ads in Metro apps with relatively standard and ugly display ads. But that might change for the better as Microsoft is hoping to push the boundaries.

Our creative agency partners include AKQA, Big Spaceship, Razorfish, Team Detroit, UM and Y&R. All six will be lending us their creative minds and expertise as we co-develop early advertising concepts. With these partners, we will look to create a new standard for what ads within Windows 8 apps can and will be, as well as ensure that experiences will be engaging for consumers and effective for marketers and publishers.

In the example posted today featuring the Seattle Sounds Football Club app, an Adidas ad is shown to seamlessly become part of the panoramic Metro experience by blending into the far right edge of the wide application view. Clicking on the ad is said to reveal a full-page Metro experience with rich advertising content and a simple one-click back button to the app.

For an ad, this is admittedly a much more beautiful and integrated experience than the traditional banner block. The ad becomes an extension of the app, rather than a nuisance within the app.

It remains to be seen if Microsoft will be able to deliver this (and the other concepts it will reveal) as a solution that developers can simply integrate into their apps through an SDK. If so, Windows 8 Ads in Apps might actually be a worthwhile monetization strategy for developers without degrading the user experience.

At Microsoft’s BUILD 2011 conference late last year, I had an impromptu discussion with a Microsoft employee who knew a thing or two behind the scenes building Windows PCs. It turns out there’s more things that go wrong than meets the eye, often at Microsoft’s expense.

With today’s announcement of the Surface, hopefully Microsoft won’t have to put up with that for much longer. Microsoft will finally have the chance to enforce the quality control they’ve yearned for.

It should be no secret PC and device OEMs have been toying with product quality for their own cost purposes, and Microsoft along with end-users getting the short end of the stick.

The most recent documented example of this is the memory chip that Samsung changed without notice in the Focus Windows Phone which resulted in a delayed Mango update.

In the Windows PC space, quality control is the silent killer across individual hardware components and even drivers. According to the individual I spoke to, Microsoft has been frustratingly aware of quality assurance issues. And there was little Microsoft could do. They were at the mercy of their own ecosystem which has let them down over and over again.

The Samsung BUILD Windows 8 slates are another great example. Out of the 5 I’ve personally handled, 3 had major hardware issues. In one, the WiFi chip would fail every ~5 minutes. In another, the screen is loose from the bevel. Last but not least, the screen would randomly register ghost touches. Yes, I may have received “a bad batch”, but the fact they even left the factory floor is unacceptable.

With the Surface, Microsoft is in control. If the attention to detail on aesthetics, engineering and functionality so far is any indication, then Microsoft has a good chance to make sure every device that it puts in customers’ hands is going to be as reliable as an iPad.

That includes ensuring hardware errors are within acceptable limits, having reliable and performant drivers/firmware (& updates) to ensure the hardware performs at specification, and not burdening the out-of-box experience with marketing bloat-ware.

Even though Microsoft has not revealed who will actually manufacturer the Surface (it might even be spread across multiple vendors like the XBOX 360), I sincerely hope the Microsoft employee I spoke to will hold them to much higher standards than what has been allowed to slip by in the past.

If nothing else, they seem to have done a pretty good job at controlling the quality of magnesium so far.

Brace yourselves Left 4 Dead fans of Melbourne Australia, your team-based zombie shooting fantasies are about to become a reality thanks to a group of enterprising Aussies who had the bright idea to combine laser tag, interactive role playing, blood-thirsty zombies and technology to create one of the best simulation shooting games.

The event is called “Patient 0” and is predictably the first of many events hosted by I.R.L (In Real Life) Shooter, should the idea become successful. It will launch on Halloween 2012, October 31st and will run for a month in Melbourne with plans to tour other cities around Australia.

If you ever wanted to get off the couch and play your favourite first person shooter video game for real, this is the event for you.

The people behind the event, Ben, David and Drew are taking this very seriously. Hosting a crowd-sourced funding run, they’ve already surpassed their goal of raising $10,000 in just 5 days. At the time of writing it’s at $12,645 from 54 supporters.

Their preparations so far has involved finding and dressing a location which not only looks abandoned and straight out of a zombie game, but feels like something nasty probably lives there anyway. To add to the eerie atmosphere, they will also be pumping professional-produced ambience sounds through an audio system. The organizer’s 10-year experience in the film industry will no doubt pull this off very well.

Anyone who has played laser tag might know that the experience of “shooting” lasers is underwhelming, which is why they’ve spared no expense in making something that feels more life-like.

They’re in the process of manufacturing custom-designed M4 assault rifle replicas with custom electronics, software and mesh-networking which will feed the servers to keep score, health, ammunition, hits and misses of the player. They’re also adding an integrated solenoid mechanism, 2″ speaker and a LED to produce the recoil, sound and muzzle flash respectively.

I think their advancements to laser gun technology alone deserves some recognition.

Then comes the stars of the game, the zombies. Paid live actors will form the cast of the opposing team which will be composed of three types of zombies – generic mindless zombies, hero zombies specific to their unique roles and even boss zombies. As Ben says “what sort of game hasn’t got bosses?”. The actors will be wearing an array of sensors which registers hits on different body parts and be coordinated by a “game maker” to pace the story.

The game will run each night (subject to demand) of November with a minimum and maximum team of 6 people. It will be story-driven with multiple levels, each with different information gathering and puzzle solving mission objectives. Tickets are to be $125 per person but are $100 now for those who “pre-order” through Pozible.

Finally for all those outside of Australia, all hope is not lost. The organizers are planning to make a short movie based in and around the game to explain more of the plot that won’t be part of the game experience. Furthermore, they are even thinking of a much bigger story-arc which they might take to oversea events. (Update: There will also be live HD video streaming from the CCTVs installed in the building)

As a Left 4 Dead game fanatic (I even own a L4D shirt), I for one am going to keep a very close eye on this project and will be organizing a group of friends to participate. Hopefully there will even be a chance to see just how well they pull this off before its launch at one of the planned “beta tests”.

Being in Australia I’ve never had a reason to look forward to the eve of Halloween, until now.

Most people probably haven’t had the chance to see a Microsoft Surface 2 (otherwise known as the Samsung SUR40) up-close. This also means the one and only app Microsoft bundles with the Surface 2, the Bing app which actually looks and works quite well, has gone unloved as well. But not any more thanks to an eye-candy video posted by development studio behind the app, Stimulant.

The app which can be used by multiple people to do up to 4 different image and map searches concurrently is shown to utilize and extend the Metro-inspired controls of the Surface 2 SDK very elegantly. It also has a nice mobile integration feature through Microsoft Tags which allow users to easily “transfer” searches from the Surface to the phone just by scanning the barcode.

I kind of wish these guys would do a Bing app for Windows 8, obviously without the need for concurrent users. At the very least I think Surface’s ScatterView would make a great addition to the WinRT framework and allow developers to present data in a much more fun and informal way. Grids are boring.

Bing’s first Australian marketing campaign actually launched last week without much fanfare since they didn’t even bother sending out a press release and I only noticed it today from an ad on Facebook.

What it is is actually a localized version of the “Bing is for doing” campaign they launched in the US in January this year. According to an advertising industry website, it is targeted at Gen-Yers to get things done by showcasing four inspiring young Australians who have achieved some remarkable results through TV ads and documentaries.

The actual people, stories and the TV ads are pretty cool which include an 18-year-old female diver who wants to save sharks, a community arts organization helping young indigenous communities, a nominated writer and performer, and a Melbourne mountain-boarder who landed the world’s first double back flip.

Even though Bing Australia’s managing director claims “(we) spent the past two years localising and refining the Bing product for Australia which was now ready for prime time”, I think it’s still a far stretch from the more compelling Bing experience they have in the US.

In my own testing, the launch of this campaign doesn’t actually reflect any significant changes in the Bing Australian experience – it’s still as third-world as its ever been.

Nevertheless, the ads are worth watching.