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Unisys Targets Just 20 Execs With Ad Campaign
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes, "Security company Unisys is taking niche marketing to a new level, aiming ads at about 20 top executives, delivering custom-covered issues of their Fortune magazine subscriptions, and even placing billboards where these individuals will be likely to see them, the Wall Street Journal reports." From the article: "If an executive flips over the mock Fortune cover, he or she will discover a letter — also individually tailored — from a senior Unisys manager describing challenges in the target's specific industry. The Fortune 'cover wraps' also offer personalized Web addresses, where the executives can find mock news videos that mention their names and tell how they achieved business success. To reinforce the message, Unisys is placing billboards and outdoor signs — albeit without information-chief portraits — close to the executives' offices. Some ads will even appear on video screens in the elevators of their office buildings."
If this was just for top buisness executives, why'd it get viewed by millions in this slash-vertisment? Obviously Unisys is advertising to all of us, albiet through a new and novel means.
What's creepy is the level of concentration of wealth, power and influence
What are you talking about? The guy with something to sell is representing products or services that are worth millions of dollars. He's not selling one single large diamond he inherited from his grandfather, The Duke. What he's selling is produced by hundreds or thousands of employees, all of whom in turn use products and services supplied by other people in the course of doing what they do. They all take home their paychecks and spend it on all sorts of other things.
Then you've got the guy he's selling to. Did you think we're talking about yachts, here, or gold-plated horse trailers? It's big-ticket IT stuff that is used to power entire business operations - upon which (at the scale we're talking about), hundreds or thousands of people will do their jobs and serve, in turn, their customers.
Just because the sales guy has a vested interest in persuading a higher-end decision maker to go one way versus another doesn't mean the decision is made in a vacuum. At that level, the decision maker is answerable to a board of directors, investors, and so on.
Like or not, large employers that do a lot of things for a lot of customers and staff use big-ticket things, like airplanes and server farms. Someone sells them, and someone decides which ones to buy. And it's rarely about just one technical dividing point or another - there's finances, support, legal issues, security reputations, and much more that figure into it. If you don't have the face time and easy relationship with someone who has to weigh all of that, you don't have a chance to convey everything you have to say.
The point of my comment is that this is the oldest story in the book, and just because some newer methods of getting a little attention and face time have evolved, the need for suppliers to woo purchasers hasn't changed one bit.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
... that's because Unisys is full of them.
I left Unisys recently and it was the wisest thing I ever did. Crazy shit like this and massive amounts of management yes men compared to technically skilled staff (hell, they even outsourced INTERNAL support to Bangalore..), it's not a company I would trust to secure my shoelaces, let alone my systems.
I'll dig ditches before I work for them again.
If you're in radio earshot of the capital beltway, you can always tell when some congressional committee or federal procurement process is closing in on a big contract decision. The local AM radio stations (and NPR sponsorship slots) will fill up with advertisements that can only be meant to influence about half a dozen people.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
if I could be guaranteed that my records were secured
Damn straight those records are secured! You won't want our competitors to have access to those data, would you? By the way, I'm afraid we are going to have to cancel your life insurance policy, and your health insurance premiums are going up. How about some low-salt chips to cheer you up?
Why in the world do you think the records would be secured in anyway that you'd want them to be secured?
it seems there's three sorts of people left at Unisys.
1 - People hoping that the company will turn around, and hoping to avoid redundancy
2 - People who are being made redundant
3 - People handing in their notice.
I left band 1 and joined band 3 last Friday. Four colleagues in my team of 9 have been made redundant. The whole team are all chargeable until at least next July on client projects, and are on site. It's not like Bangalore can suddenly go on-site... Another colleague will be handing in his notice as soon as clearance comes through. That leaves 3 people to do the work that clients have paid 9 people to do. Offshoring won't work.
To be pissing away money on this sort of advertising when the company is collapsing is disgusting. The phrase "swansong" comes into mind, as does "desperation".
What's left of the company is going to be struggling to meet existing contractual commitments, and sales are going ballistic to bring in business for Q4. I don't believe they can deliver what they're trying to win.
While this "invasion of privacy" is a little unsettling, we're talking about 20 very high-profile people here, not John Q. public.
Also, everybody seems to be missing the other half of the story, namely how they targeted specifically this small group of people instead of wasting more money on a broader campaign. How much money did they save? How much more were they free to spend since they were targeting such a small group? How does the creativity angle work when you're targeting one guy instead of a large, poorly-defined wad?
The privacy angle here is a red herring. We should be talking about Advertising and marketing getting out of the 19th century.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Whoever did this ad campaign should be fired, dumped in the gutter, and blackballed from the industry. Why? Because a simple sales call would have accomplished the same thing for a tenth of a percent the cost.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I think, as someone else pointe out, that the issue is that, with so many companies competing for the attention of these execs and all offering blonde bombshells and trips to the Caymans, managing to get picked to be one of the companies supplying such things and hence getting contact with the execs, is rather hard. To get to that stage you first have to compete for their attention at all - and that's most likely what this campaign is about.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Back in the early 70s I worked for Burroughs supporting their largest mainframes. Burroughs later merged with Sperry to form Unisys. We had an account manager who needed to get the attention of the executives in charge of all the regional IBM systems. In those days the safe choice was IBM, but the other smaller vendors each had much better products. They simply couldn't exist in that environment If they weren't superior to IBM. it was well known that "no one got fired for choosing IBM." So, one day he sent each of these executives a baby pacifier to remind them of the security blanket they were hiding behind.