Office 2021 contains advertisements from Microsoft for Microsoft 365.

by | Mar 7, 2024

Microsoft is promoting Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions to users of Office 2021, giving them savings of more than $28 for a 3-month Family plan subscription.

This week, beginning on August 10, a number of users on Twitter have reported seeing similar advertisements. Lee Holmes, a Principal Security Architect at Microsoft Azure Security, shared a screenshot of an advertisement that was presented as an alert bar beneath the Office menu today.

Customers may “Get 3 months of Microsoft 365 Family for just $0.99” thanks to Microsoft’s designation of this advertisement as a “LIMITED OFFER,” as seen in the screenshot below.

The fact that Microsoft replaces the “Allow content” button with a banner format that is identical to the one it uses when asking Office users to enable macros makes this advertisement more worse.

Other users have noticed ads with slightly altered wording that read, “Get 3 months of Microsoft 365 Family for $0.99 and share with up to 5 people. It’s comparable to receiving six subscriptions in one. THERE ARE TERMS.”

Microsoft also utilises a separate button in this advertisement, directing viewers to click a “Redeem now” button to obtain the steeply reduced membership.

There Are Advertisements Everywhere :

Microsoft has previously included advertisements into the user interfaces of Office suite and other Windows applications.

Two years ago, the business advertised its free Office online applications under the menu bar of the Windows 10 Wordpad programme.

On devices running the most recent Windows 11 Insider release, Microsoft in March included advertisements for several of its other products (including Microsoft Editor) in the File Explorer programme.

When Redmond displayed OneDrive advertisements in 2016, File Explorer was infused with with another set of marketing messages.

Every time users looked for rival browsers in the Windows 10 Start Menu, Microsoft also showed advertisements for Microsoft Edge, encouraging them to download the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge.

The Windows Start Menu and Taskbar were broken by Microsoft when testing Microsoft Teams advertisements on Windows Insiders, which is unfortunate because some of these experiments also had unexpected repercussions.