Paul Wilson, chief marketing officer at SunGard Financial Systems, is breathing fresh air into video marketing and shining the way for more B2B brands to follow suit. Victoria Clarke reports
The views atop the 40th floor of the Citibank building in London’s Canary Wharf, home to financial software provider SunGard, are magnificent. How anyone with an office up there gets any work done with a view like that is beyond me. Paul Wilson, CMO at SunGard agrees it’s sometimes tricky not to get too distracted and admits he has a short attention span. So how does he stay focused marketing for one of the world’s biggest software giants? Simple, he says “I’m excited about what I do and I like it a lot.”
SunGard provides global software and IT services and solutions, including financial systems, to just about every area of the finance industry in 70 countries – from microfinance in India to private equity firms in California, to the world’s biggest over the counter and listed derivative traders. It’s one of those brands where many people have probably heard of it, but only know a little about what it actually offers. Raising brand awareness is therefore a huge challenge for Wilson – so what’s been the answer?
Clever branding. Not pushing its multiple financial systems, but rather taking a topical issue for the industry and creating a conversation around it. Wilson calls it “branding the problem,” and it’s worked remarkably well. SunGard first tried it back in 2008 after the collapse of Lehmans with its ‘What happens next?’ campaign. A global array of finance industry luminaries were asked the question “What happens next?” to which thought leadership was primarily promoted alongside a subtle marketing message about SunGard’s expertise in tackling the considerable problems. This campaign later fuelled the idea behind the brand’s current ‘TEN’ campaign – winner of ‘Best international campaign’ at the B2B Marketing Awards 2011.
Knowledge comes first
The ongoing TEN campaign captures the lively industry debate under the headings of ‘Transparency’, ‘Efficiency’ and ‘Networks’ – key issues affecting today’s global finance industry. It’s very much driven by thought leadership and has achieved notable global success with thousands of industry executives taking part. It has also pushed new marketing boundaries for Wilson and his team.
One such frontier is the campaign’s use of animated video and gamification techniques. Wilson explains the video marketing aspect of the campaign involved a complex and challenging process, firstly in trying to find an agency to help communicate such complex content without dumbing it down. He reveals many of the agencies were keen to over-simplify SunGard’s message in order to communicate what they thought was a more straight forward and jargon-free proposition. However, Wilson pays tribute to SunGard’s business-minded and technically savvy customers who are capable of understanding complex issues and concepts.
He explains, “We’re a vendor into banks and one of the things that differentiates us is our deep domain knowledge, and this is built through communicating about our expertise. It’s like going to a doctor’s conference and saying “Blood goes around the body.” That would destroy your credibility – we need to get into the molecular, cellular structure of the blood cell and show how we’re experts in how blood moves around the body.” Wilson asserts domain knowledge comes first for SunGard, branding comes second.
While SunGard uses agencies for many projects, all of its campaign messaging and much of its campaign creative is devised internally, led by an inhouse creative director.
Movie magic
The second challenge Wilson faced with the video aspect of the TEN campaign was finding the right animation company. He explains SunGard’s corporate AV partner, Pretzel, found a small LA-based animation company consisting of a bunch of “crazy young people using software we hadn’t even heard of”. This zany organisation, which primarily worked on movie title sequences, agreed to take on SunGard’s detailed brief despite having never worked with a finance industry client before. As such, Wilson admits the experience was “lumpy and not for the faint hearted” but he found it hugely rewarding on many levels, and results have shown it paid off in terms of achieving serious cut-through and ROI for the campaign.
Wilson advises, “It’s good to have a close relationship with a small boutique animation house who are keen for the work. If you go to a big agency, they will often subcontract a small boutique anyway, so why not go find one yourself and forge an enjoyable creative partnership with smart people.”
He continues, “ It’s a good idea to find people who are interested in the subject matter, and will see this job is more interesting and challenging than their bread-and-butter animation [i.e. about consumer products]. This doesn’t cost anything like as much as you might think because you can expand the boutique’s portfolio. It will force you to clarify your value proposition concisely, in a way that can be instantly scaled globally and is relatively good for the environment.”
Despite SunGard being intertwined with a challenging financial landscape and at the precipice of constantly evolving technology, Wilson appears simultaneously chilled out and yet mad keen about his professional challenges. These somewhat opposing characteristics manifest themselves in the new marketing boundaries he’s unafraid to push. In the finance world, where the likes of animation and gamification are rarely seen, it’s highly refreshing.
Wilson’s top tips on video marketing
1. Clearly identify what business problems you want to solve for your customers and make a family of animations that solve them in a common way. You’ve then got the building blocks of a good campaign.
2. Use a ‘narrative arc’ to design the flow of the story – set out the issue, build tension, resolve it.
3. Allow plenty of time to plan your script before you develop it creatively. Shorten the script, and then shorten it again. It’s a lot cheaper to change things on paper than once you’ve started designing.
4. Agree mood boards with your creative team but let them manage the creative process so the final result is a strong design with clever animation.
5. Thinking about the ROI from a video in isolation is misguided. The video should ease your audience into a deeper conversation off or online. The ROI should then be taken across the continuum of activities with careful consideration given to tracking this process.
