Summary
- Major brand launch for Siemens newly independent IT services division.
- Bold positioning taking ownership of emerging “Business Technology” category.
- Simple, powerful creative.
- Highly successful internal launch campaign.
- International external campaign featuring super accurate targeting.
- Research reveals target audience as frequent smartphone users.
- High impact, exclusive placements sourced through partnership with IDG.
- 4,589 clicks generated by mobile ads out of 7,212 campaign total.
- Mobile ads achieving 264 per cent of target.
The client company
Siemens is a huge company, but in making its outsourced IT division independent and launching the new brand it was taking on some of the worlds biggest.
Strategy
Everyone dreams of revolutionising their market but the conditions are rarely right. As we looked into the IT market we discovered a major opportunity to do just that. Thought leaders and forward thinking companies were debating, and practising, the end of IT and the start of something more useful to the leaner, greener 21st Century organisation. They called it Business Technology, born from the need to align business strategy with technology. The CIO’s role was changing from the biggest IT guy to a master operational strategist. And he knew that ‘information’ is too small a word to cover the role of chnology in modern business. A category was forming before our eyes. Business Technology was a category in the making. And the more we looked around at SIS competitors, the more we realised Business Technology was a category for the taking.
Objectives
Put simply the object of the campaign was to launch the brand and position SIS as the Business
Technologists. The strategy is ambitious but simple: To take ownership of the emerging category of Business Technology. In doing so we hope SIS will be as synonymous with BT as Coke is with Cola. We knew the SIS culture and offering was able to deliver the promise of Business Technology but we had to make sure the products were presented in the context of the new Business Technology paradigm. So aligning SIS products and their 36,000 people was priority one. Then a major international campaign was planned to launch the Business Technologists and edge the market from IT closer to the Business Technology tipping point. At which point, who would people turn to for Business Technology? The Business Technologists of course.
The target audience
The target audience consisted of global IT decision makers based in the UK, US, Germany and Austria. The main issue with the external campaign was accurately targeting and reaching the right people. Our research indicated that smartphone use was close to universal within the target group.
Media, channels, techniques
We created a range of multilingual flash banners, each introducing individual business technologists with powerful business technologist proclamations and clear calls-to-action, with links to the Siemens website. We partnered with IDG, the world’s leading technology media company, to position our web banners on some of their major, global brand publications such as CIO and ComputerWorld. To achieve maximum exposure we booked space throughout the publication websites including on their mobile sites and mobile apps. Through our partnership with IDG we were able to source high impact, exclusive placements for our mobile banner ads.
Timescale
The campaign ran for a month from January to February 2011.
Results
Overall, the campaign achieved 7,212 clicks at a click through rate (CTR) of 0.21 per cent. Mobile was by far the most productive element, generating 4,859 of these clicks, over delivering by a staggering 264 per cent. Highlights included an exclusively placed banner on UK Computerworld’s mobile site attaining a CTR of 0.73 per cent, UK CIO BlackBerry app mobile banner CTR 0.62 per cent and US CIO mobile banner generating a huge 1510 clicks at a CTR of 0.60 per cent.
Client testimonial
“IAS’ expertise in digital marketing really is impressive. The targeting of these mobile ads was
essential to their absolutely outstanding results.” David Burnard, vice president, global customer and portfolio marketing at Siemens IT Solutions and Services
