From the Metro UI to the “Really” ads, the Windows Phone 7 team seems to be able to operate outside of the typical Microsoft marketing department rules and regs that have ruined more than their fair share of the company’s products, often turning them into jokes.

This outsider trend appears to be continuing with an advertising experiment that is taking place in England over the Christmas holidays.

The report; which comes from MediaWeek UK, has Microsoft partnering with England’s Channel 4 to run what they are calling sting ads over the course of two nights in the lead-up to Christmas.

The ads will be in the form of mini-stories that use Bing and Windows Phone 7 to promote other company products.

The two “mini stories” will be shown during ‘Jamie’s Best Ever Christmas’, which airs at 9 PM on 21 December and during ‘Come Dine with Me’, airing at 9 PM on 22 December.

Created by Duke and Earl, Microsoft will run its own ads, but also point to other brand advertising, using stings in between every ad break, including those of Sainsbury’s, Xbox, Boots, The Co-op, Ferrero Rocher, Confused.com, Coty and Southern Comfort, creating a narrative to support its own marketing push. The deal was brokered by Universal McCann.

Using the strapline “Bing it this Christmas with your Windows Phone 7″, the ads feature a storyline about a man and a woman in the throes of a Christmas emergency, such as forgetting the in-laws are coming for Christmas. As the shows cut to the first break, viewers are invited to “stay tuned to see how Bing and Windows Phone 7 help save Christmas”.

Each subsequent break features the shoppers using their Windows Phone 7, including the Bing search engine, to help solve a different aspect of the nightmare, such as tracking down and getting directions to the nearest Sainsbury’s to buy a turkey, or researching fun for all the family.

As the shoppers type Sainsbury’s or Kinect Sports into the Bing search engine on their Windows Phone 7, the break cuts to the ad for that brand. The final ad break in each program shows the Windows Phone 7 with the Bing home page, and then spins to show the phone’s home page, with an Orange app clearly visible.

Too bad we don’t see the same type of imagination being used to market the phone on this side of the big pond.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]