Microsoft puts the pressure on Slack with first TV ad for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft is unveiling its first TV commercial for Microsoft Teams this weekend. A 30-second ad will air during Sunday’s NFL playoffs, and will also be shown in the UK, France, and Germany next month. Dubbed “The Power of Teams,” the ad opens with boring business meetings, flip charts, ancient speaker phones, and slidedecks printed on paper before quickly moving on to Teams. Microsoft has been aligning its Teams software as the hub for the future of its Office suite, and this ad plays into that.

This TV commercial, which also includes Microsoft’s latest Surface hardware, is obviously designed to take on Slack in markets that may consider the rival group chat software over Microsoft’s alternative. Microsoft has successfully chased and overtaken its Slack competition during the past year, leading to Teams being used actively by 20 million people daily compared to Slack’s 12 million.

The competition has been tense recently, with Microsoft claiming Slack doesn’t have the “breadth and depth that’s really required to reinvent what it looks like to work together.” Slack has claimed it’s not worried about the reach of Office 365, and it’s focused on how many of its users love its product and the amount of time they spend using the app. Slack even mocked Microsoft last year, accusing it of ripping off its ads.

Despite the increased competition between both companies, there’s likely room for both Slack and Microsoft Teams in the market. A large number of small businesses rely on a combination of Zoom, Slack, Google, and Dropbox instead of an Office 365 subscription. Whereas Microsoft is comfortably winning the larger enterprise side of the chat app market, with 91 companies from the Fortune 100 already using Microsoft Teams.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070838/microsoft-teams-tv-commercial-ad-nfl-playoffs-slack-competition