Many if not most Americans do not know that AG after the name of a German company denotes that it is a shareholder company, either privately or publicly held. Thus while Software A.G. of North America (SAGNA) was affiliated with one of the largest information technology companies in Europe, the name held little currency with desirable target audience(s) in the United States. Moreover, while the company’s software was held in high regard by its own customers, that was a relatively small community. Few others associated the software with solutions to the hottest IT topics and concerns of the day.
This campaign sought to change that fact … and did so with remarkable success. In addition to high publication recognition and readership scores for the ads themselves, strategic media buys and partnerships with CIO and Fortune magazines “upped the ante” by selling to upper IT and corporate management targets to supplement the usual, more technical focus. We negotiated extremely favorable schedules at greatly reduced costs (e.g., thirteen insertions in the weekly Fortune for the cost of six); FREE cover-wraps of one ad produced for both magazines, with the magazines delivered to the hotel rooms of IT industry-wide conference attendees; and other support for a symposium hosted by SAGNA for existing and targeted corporate customers. Most important, the ad which featured a bookshelf of (fabricated) volumes identifying critical issues resulted in overwhelming and lasting association by the target audience of SAGNA products and powerful solutions. (As an aside, the client received numerous C-level requests for reprints of the series of books, which of course did not exist except for the ad’s photo shoot.)
