Microsoft and McCann New York digitised ADLaM, the Fulani alphabet, winning two Cannes Lion Grand Prix awards in 2023 and integrating the typeface across
Microsoft ADLaM Campaign Turns a Handwritten Alphabet Into a Digital Lifeline
Microsoft's 2023 campaign 'Can an alphabet preserve a culture?' partnered with McCann New York and brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry to digitise ADLaM, the handwritten alphabet created for the Pulaar-speaking Fulani people of West Africa, integrating the redesigned typeface across Microsoft 365 and making it freely available as a downloadable font.
Pulaar is spoken by over 40 million people, according to Clapboard's editorial review of the campaign record. Despite its vast speaker base, the language existed for most of its history without a standardised written form. Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, determined since childhood to preserve their native tongue, developed ADLaM — an acronym that, as the brothers themselves explained to LBB Online, stands for Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol, meaning the alphabet that will prevent the culture, the people, from disappearing. The brothers first connected with Microsoft at a Unicode conference in 2018, as reported by Campaign magazine.
The campaign's central challenge was not invention but amplification. Early digital versions of the ADLaM typeface existed, but they required refinement to be readable, writable, and adoptable at scale. Microsoft and McCann New York convened a group of expert typeface designers alongside the Barry brothers to produce a revised version of the font, incorporating new letter forms that reflected how ADLaM had naturally evolved within the Fulani community itself. The result — the ADLaM Display font — became available to download on Unlocked Microsoft and was deployed natively across the Microsoft 365 suite on desktop and mobile platforms. The campaign was published on 3 July 2023 and classified across the Electronic Devices and Public Interest categories, with the integrated work containing a documentary component that gave the project its emotional and narrative spine. Clapboard rates this campaign 88 out of 100.
Microsoft identified a structural gap that no major technology competitor had moved to close. The Fulani people represent one of the largest ethnolinguistic communities in West Africa, yet the digital infrastructure of global technology platforms — from operating systems to social media interfaces — had been built around scripts that did not include Pulaar. Without a digitised, standardised alphabet, Pulaar speakers could not fully conduct commerce, access information, or communicate through social media in their own language.
The strategic insight McCann New York brought to Microsoft's brief was that language access is not a peripheral corporate responsibility initiative — it is a product problem with a product solution. Competitors such as Google and Apple have made significant investments in multilingual interfaces and localisation, as Microsoft's own 2023 annual report acknowledges in identifying Google among its principal competitive counterparts across platform and cloud services. Yet neither had approached the Fulani language through the specific lens of co-creating and distributing a purpose-built typeface. Microsoft's intervention positioned its platforms — particularly the Microsoft 365 ecosystem — as the infrastructure through which a living language could survive modernisation rather than be erased by it.
The global consumer electronics market provides the commercial backdrop. According to Virtue Market Research, the sector was valued at hundreds of billions of dollars in 2023 and is forecast to grow at approximately seven percent annually through the early 2030s, per projections cited by Market Us. Within that landscape, Microsoft's campaign argued implicitly that the next frontier for electronic devices is not processing power but linguistic inclusivity — the capacity of devices to serve speakers of languages that have historically been excluded from digital spaces. That argument carried particular resonance in West Africa, where mobile adoption is accelerating and where Pulaar speakers represent a significant and underserved user base.
The creative execution centres on a documentary format that places Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry at the heart of the narrative. McCann New York made a deliberate choice to let the brothers' own words carry the weight of the argument. Abdoulaye Barry stated, as quoted by LBB Online: 'ADLaM has increased the chance of the language to survive, even in areas where the language has been dominated. We have our own alphabet. That's a source of pride.' That register — personal, historically grounded, unsentimental — defined the tone of the entire campaign.
Shayne Millington, Co-Chief Creative Officer at McCann New York, framed the creative rationale in terms that connected purpose to technological specificity, as reported by LBB Online. The campaign avoided the abstraction that weakens much corporate social impact advertising by grounding every claim in a concrete, verifiable deliverable: the ADLaM Display font, freely downloadable, natively integrated, and co-designed with the community it was built to serve. The typeface revision was not cosmetic. Expert typeface designers working alongside the Barry brothers incorporated new letter forms reflecting the alphabet's organic evolution within Fulani usage — a creative and linguistic decision that gave the final product its authenticity.
The production approach combined the documentary with an integrated campaign architecture spanning digital, social, and platform touchpoints, reflecting the Electronic Devices category context in which the work was entered. As Contagious reported in 2023, the project emphasised Microsoft's conversion of the ADLaM script into display fonts suitable for social media use — a detail that underscores how the creative execution was inseparable from the distribution strategy. Production credits beyond those of Millington and the Barry brothers are not fully documented in publicly available records for this campaign, though the typeface design collaboration involved a named group of professional type designers working under the McCann New York and Microsoft brief.
No single verified commercial performance metric for the ADLaM campaign — such as font download volume or Pulaar-language Microsoft 365 activation data — is publicly available. What the public record does confirm, across multiple named sources, is an award performance that signals industry consensus on the campaign's effectiveness and craft.
The campaign won seven Cannes Lions in 2023, including two Grand Prix awards in Design and Creative Business Transformation, according to WARC. Additional Lions included one Gold in Industry Craft, two Golds in Brand Experience and Activation, one Silver in Sustainable Development Goals, one Bronze in Creative Business Transformation, and one Bronze in Brand Experience and Activation, also per WARC. At the One Show, the campaign earned three Best of Show distinctions, seven Gold awards, and two Silver awards, with specific categories unverified in publicly available sources. In 2024, the campaign received Gold and Silver Effie awards, as documented by WARC, though the precise Effie categories have not been independently verified.
Contagious described the work as combining purpose and technology to codify an alphabet for the Fulani language, specifically noting Microsoft's role in converting ADLaM into display fonts for social media — a formulation that captures the structural effectiveness of the campaign even in the absence of granular reach data. The ADLaM Display font's availability on unlocked.microsoft.com and its native deployment across the Microsoft 365 suite represent a distribution outcome that is itself a measurable result: a typeface serving a community of Pulaar speakers, embedded permanently in one of the world's most widely used productivity platforms.
Microsoft's 2023 campaign partnered with McCann New York and brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry to digitise ADLaM, the handwritten alphabet for the Pulaar-speaking Fulani people of West Africa. The revised ADLaM Display font was integrated natively across Microsoft 365 and made freely downloadable, preserving a language spoken by over 40 million people.
The campaign won seven Cannes Lions in 2023, including two Grand Prix awards in Design and Creative Business Transformation, according to WARC. It also received one Gold in Industry Craft, two Golds in Brand Experience and Activation, one Silver in Sustainable Development Goals, and two Bronze awards across related categories.
Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry created ADLaM. The brothers developed the handwritten alphabet to give the Fulani people a written form for their Pulaar language. They first connected with Microsoft at a Unicode conference in 2018, as reported by Campaign magazine, beginning the collaboration that led to the 2023 campaign.
ADLaM stands for Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol, meaning the alphabet that will prevent the culture from disappearing, as explained by the Barry brothers to LBB Online. The acronym signals the alphabet's purpose: ensuring that Pulaar speakers can write, conduct commerce, and communicate digitally in their own language without cultural erasure.
McCann New York produced the campaign for Microsoft in 2023. Shayne Millington, Co-Chief Creative Officer at McCann New York, led the creative direction, as reported by LBB Online. The campaign combined a documentary format with an integrated platform strategy, co-designed with the Barry brothers and a team of expert typeface designers.
The ADLaM Display font is available to download on unlocked.microsoft.com and is deployed natively across the Microsoft 365 suite on desktop and mobile platforms. This distribution ensures that Pulaar speakers can use the digitised Fulani alphabet across productivity applications and social media without requiring specialised or paid software.
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