Consumer culture
As business IT becomes more consumerised, enterprise tech giants are turning to traditional consumer outlets to talk up their latest offerings
It's Sunday night at 9:10pm and Downton Abbey has reached its first advert break. You get up to stick the kettle on, and hear the usual cacophony of talking meerkats and sing-along car insurance commercials in the background. But amid the din, the words "big data", "cloud" and "business" jump out at you. No, the TV network has not had a mix-up and accidentally hit play on the vendor presentation you saw last week, it is actually part of the latest marketing initiative employed by some of the world's biggest enterprise tech firms.
IBM, HP and O2 have all taken to consumer media outlets over recent weeks, not to talk up their latest and greatest consumer gear, but to shine a light on their enterprise offerings instead.
HP has snapped up advertising space in the breaks of prime-time TV shows such as the X Factor, Downton Abbey and Homeland; on billboards at major train stations and airports; at the cinema and in national newspapers in a bid to inform the masses about its credentials in enterprise tech. IBM enlisted Mamma Mia and History Boys actor Dominic Cooper as part of its business cloud TV campaign and O2 Business also grabbed a slice of the action by taking to the small screen to boast about its business capabilities.
But why have the big names in enterprise tech turned to B2C channels to advertise their B2B products? It's all about the consumerisation of IT, according to Miguel Adao, HP's Enterpise Group marketing director, who is the brains behind the firm's latest campaign.
"BYOD and consumerisation of IT - there are different names for this phenomenon, but it's true," he said.
"Now it is really hard to separate [work from your personal life] - you don't leave your work behind. Players such as Apple have accelerated this too. We're all mobile, we all have our tablets and smartphones and can all access our work and play from everywhere, so it is inevitable that the two worlds will merge more and more."
Getting personal
According to recent research from Gartner, half of technology sales staff today are selling directly to individuals working across businesses, instead of direct to the boss of the IT department, which used to be the norm. Adao said reaching a range of staff was essential in his latest advertising campaign.
"We want to touch several different people in the organisation: everyone from the CIO to the junior IT guys," he said. "These men and women consume content in different ways - some will watch Downtown Abbey, some will read only the Financial Times, some are on the train to Waterloo, but some fly through Heathrow. We have to catch them at different points, so we have to go broader."
The power of individuals to make their own tech decisions outside the jurisdiction of the IT department has transformed the way advertising in enterprise tech space works, according to e-commerce vendor Avangate.
Its marketing director Mike Ni explained how B2I - business-to-individual - marketing is taking off.
"When Salesforce.com started online, one of its innovations was that it could take a credit card," he explained. "Someone could say, ‘I'm in my department, I just need to try out this [software]. I looked at the demo, let me download it and put it on the credit card - I'm OK, I have an expense account, I can afford it for the five people on my team.' Then another sales manager says ‘hey, what are you using?' and puts his credit card details down.
"Then for Salesforce, it wasn't about ‘let me pitch to you how great Salesforce is', it's about ‘you already have 55 people using Salesforce, would you like an enterprise account?' That's how it has changed.
"So now [marketing] is about ‘how do I get the individual buyers to feel comfortable
enough to put down their company credit cards'."
He said the new marketing theory is what venture capitalists call "the leakage model", evidence of which - perhaps contrary to the way it sounds - it is almost essential for them to see before they part with their cash.
"It means you leak in from the bottom; it is not a direct attack with sales guys from the top," Ni said. "First you leak into this department, then another, and then you flood the basement. This is how people are trying to sell today and if you have that model, this is what [VCs] want to fund."
Long-term commitment
The growth in cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) trends has made brand awareness more important than ever, Ni added. He said signing a big software deal is no longer the end game for vendors, who need to keep their brands at the front of end users' minds every single day.
"In the past, people would buy a large ELA and not use it - 60 to 80 per cent of the software [would be] sitting on the shelf not being used," he said. "But the world of SaaS has changed that. If it is not being used, the number of seats goes down right away. So the challenge is how you continue to educate and actively sell your solution to the people using it every day. Advertising awareness and keeping top of mind to them is a part of that."
HP's Adao admitted that targeting work-based tech to individuals while they are relaxing during evenings and weekends is "somewhat unusual" and could risk rubbing people up the wrong way, but said this was taken into account when designing the adverts' content.
"Often when we go on TV it is to advertise a computer or a printer so this is the first time in many, many years that HP has approached it for a bigger, enterprise story," he said.
"I think with the wrong content you would annoy people who would think ‘let me just enjoy my TV show!' but the way we did the content - both TV and cinema adverts - means they have a really strong emotional connection. We're not selling products with this campaign; it's not a boring ‘buy the latest from HP'. It's basically just some nice visuals and some catchy music - we are making the message more appropriate for the medium."
Oldies but goodies
Marketing agency Onebite works with a range of technology clients across B2B and B2C markets. Its director Tom Wood said the B2I trend is definitely of interest to its clients right now and reported strong demand for increasingly creative marketing campaigns through digital and emerging channels.
"Clients are much more aware of the wider range of channels now," he said. "[The idea used to be] to print more flyers or get a bigger stand at a show, but now they are much more aware of the different channels and they are after creativity. They don't want stock images, for example, they want stuff that will shine through. Recent award-winning B2B adverts rate up there with the best B2C adverts."
He said traditional trade shows and events will still have a place in B2B marketing in future, but that creativity is key.
HP's Adao was keen to stress that his latest consumer-style campaign would not replace "traditional" B2B marketing any time soon.
"As we evolve the campaign in the new fiscal year, we will go deeper and have those one-to-one conversations via telemarketing, events and one-to-ones in the channel, for example," he said."But for these months, the objective was indeed to just raise awareness and create that ‘halo effect' that we can then build on. We will continue to do very targeted and product-focused [marketing] with tech language to IT decision makers.
"We will continue with webinars and demand-generation activity. But we will mix and match that with broader awareness-building where we can have a bigger stage to share our voice and our point of view."
Ice breaker
Big-budget TV and cinema adverts and giant billboards
have become a talking point in the channel, according to Adao, who said some reseller partners have got so behind the scheme that they have created their own spin-off
mini campaigns.
"Many of them are actively starting their own competitions internally - for example, selfie contests for taking pictures in front of adverts, black cabs and so on," he said. "I'm seeing already from our key partners that they are benefiting. This has enabled them to have a conversation with their customer base that they wouldn't have had otherwise. They can have a bigger conversation. We're seeing the channel is very engaged and very much benefiting from this effort as well.
"It [works as] a nice ice breaker. You can say ‘oh, did you see [the adverts] at Waterloo, or Heathrow, or during Downton Abbey? This is something we can talk to you about'.Then they can go into meaningful conversations from there."