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Comment by liquidchicken | Hacker News Reader

Did MS ever even run an advertising campaign for Windows Phone? I don't recall ever seeing commercials or web ads explicitly for Phone. There were some that referenced it in the vein of "Here's a thing, and another thing, oh... and also this phone thing.", but I don't recall seeing anything else.

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They ran an early advertisement when they actually chastised phone users for using their phones too much. I guessed then this wouldn't end well as their corporate DNA simply wouldn't let it succeed.

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-windows-phone-7-ads...

I think the majority of their advertising was placement ads. There are many, many TV shows that featured the characters using Windows Phones (Scandal did for the longest time, might still do).

Shows like Hawaii Five-0 and NCIS:LA have HUGE Microsoft product placement. Arrow now does as well. They use Surfaces, Windows Phones, etc.

One of the more painful product placement attempts was trying to get actors to use the expression "Bing it", as if that was ever going to catch on. (I use Bing, it's not bad, but seriously, I'm never going to say that.)

I know Scandal prominently featured Windows phones.

Yes, I saw phoneboxes here in the UK advertising it, citing Cortana as the key feature.

I've also seen Cortana-based video adverts, though I don't recall if they were on TV or online (also UK). They were really quite poor, didn't do anything to differentiate and just came across as a "we have Siri too!" message.

I recall tv spots in Germany for Lumia but one of them was mostly about how much better the camera is and the other was the usual cringeworthy lifestyle crap.

Really early after the Nokia acquisition they did a huge Windows phone launch push. But they never really did a sustained campaign as far as I can tell.

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