My Role Microsoft – MSN
I came to MSN from BEET — Microsoft’s in-house design and advertising studio — where I’d been building monetized, branded entertainment experiences for major brands. Brought in to help reinvent MSN Entertainment, I owned the entertainment side while the broader design org took on a total redesign of MSN, and a few BEET colleagues came with me. This work couldn’t have been done without them.
We built custom branded solutions for advertisers — editorial and advertorial experiences that ranged from original video series to interactive tools and calculators (investment tools for clients like Bank of America among them). Each typically ran about three months, featured on the MSN homepage with guaranteed reach and click-through. It began as a response to advertiser RFPs: with our content writers, producers, and program managers, we’d shape a story pitch for the client’s agency, then build the branding and visual language alongside their team — bringing in specialist writers, video production companies, and, for the biggest programs, celebrities.
As a solution neared agency approval, we brought in development to scope cost and timeline — and for tech-heavy builds, much earlier, to keep the integration seamless. The projects here lean to the visual, entertaining end of that range — the original ideas I most enjoyed dreaming up.
Nothing like it had been sold before, so we had no benchmark for pricing — we anchored to what a solution cost to build, marked it up substantially, and set a deliberately modest first-year goal. We blew past it — then doubled, tripled, and quadrupled it over the following years on the strength of returning advertisers. By the end these programs were generating eight-figure revenue per campaign and tens of millions a year. The irony I’m proudest of: I wasn’t part of MSN’s celebrated global redesign — but these programs are what paid for it.