In a recent post on the Windows Phone blog Microsoft shared some numbers on the Smoked campaign:
- 8,000,000 views of Smoked by Windows Phone videos since January
- 50,000+ smartphones have been Smoked by Windows Phone since CES
- 98% is Windows Phone global win percentage
- 36 is the number of countries running Smoked by Windows Phone or related campaigns. While the campaign was started by Microsoft at CES, and then continued at Microsoft stores in the US, it has since been taken up by Nokia in the UK (Dare to Live), India (Blown Away by Lumia) and many other countries.
- 100,000,000+ is the estimated number of people that the campaign has reached
Of course "Smoked By Windows Phone" is a marketing campaign and it is fair to say that the odds are stacked in favour of Windows Phone with well trained demo staff up against the general public and the chosen challenge tasks, in most cases, playing to Windows Phone's strengths.
Nonetheless, it is a clever way of showing off what Windows Phone can do and promoting the message that it is a fast and intuitive platform. Given its relative market position, such a positive message can only help raise awareness of the platform and helps create a lot of positive social media stories.
As a flavour of the world wide nature of the Smoked by Windows Phone campaign here's a few videos from around the world.
This first video, from South Africa, shows Nokia running their own version, "Lost to Lumia", of the campaign, in a shopping mall. In this case there was RS100 reward for any smartphone that could beat a Lumia in tagging and uploading a picture to Facebook:
This video shows a similar event taking place in Indonesia:
And this video shows one the episodes from Nokia UK's "Dare to Live" campaign, which saw challengers hurled 30 feet into the air if they were on the losing side of the challenge...