Sybase certainly created a memorable image in its most recent TV commercials.
In a campaign devised by the San Francisco office of GMO/Hill Holliday, prospective customers were buried alive by piles of software boxes raining upon them from the sky.
"You depend on Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and hundreds of other software packages," intoned the sympathetic voice-over announcer as the boxes fell. But not all software is compatible, the commercial noted, indicating that the consequences can be disastrous for a company's operations and its bottom line. Sybase was presented as the solution, ready and able to come to its customers' rescue by integrating all their programs.
The spots ended with the campaign's slogan, "Everything works better when everything works together." The ads began running in the spring. But that, as they say, was then.
These days, because of its recent acquisition of another company, New Era of Networks, Sybase's software integration capabilities have increased significantly, said Paul Connolly, vice president for strategic marketing at Sybase. The economy has turned uncertain. And Sybase faces increasingly aggressive marketing by its competitors, not only the industry giants mentioned in its commercials, but also from smaller firms like BEA Systems, among others.
As a result, the ads from the spring no longer seem right on target, Connolly said. Today, he said, Sybase needs to do something stronger to counter the competition. So what's an agency to do? Junk a campaign that is barely a few months old?
You bet, said Patrick Godfrey, vice president and account director at the San Francisco office of GMO/Hill Holliday, which is part of the Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos unit of the Interpublic Group of Cos. Soon after the New Era acquisition, which was completed in June, both client and agency concluded that the campaign should be scrapped in favor of another, more aggressive one.
Sybase is "a classic challenger brand," said Godfrey, one that so far has ended up "on the short end of the database wars." The new ads, set to begin running in September, present "e-business myths" and are meant to debunk what Godfrey called all the hype in the software integration marketplace today.
One of the new print ads, tentatively titled "Five Blatant Lies," purports to counter claims by competitors like, "Speed is always the most important thing" and, "We'll support you, no matter what" -- claims that the ad likens to "The check is in the mail."
Connolly of Sybase put thecampaign budget at US$15 million for this year and next, a figure that includes the old and the new ads. The company expects to run the new advertisements in mainstream business magazines like Forbes and Fortune, in technology publications like InformationWeek and CIO Magazine, and also online on Web sites like Cnet. Broadcast ads will come later. The entire campaign will run at least through early next year. That will give the company time to get to "the technology-literate middle managers" who are ultimately responsible for "picking the software" that most companies buy. "They are our most important audience," he said.
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