NEXTGEN CIO

TitleNEXTGEN CIO
BrandIBM
Product / ServiceTECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
CategoryB04. Business Products & Services
EntrantOGILVY & MATHER SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE
Entrant Company OGILVY & MATHER SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE
Advertising Agency OGILVY & MATHER SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE

Credits

Name Company Position
Nicole Kim Cbsi Program Coordinator
Angus Macaskill Cbsi Program Director
Nick Vildzius Cbsi Account Director
Curtis Tracey Neo@ogilvy Media Planner
Yeeling Lee Neo@ogilvy Media Planner
Fiona Seton Ogilvy And Mather Assoc Creative Director
Carmen Mcauley Ogilvy And Mather Group Account Director
Roberta Macdonald Ogilvy And Mather Group Account Director
Jessica Friedman Ogilvy And Mather Account Coordinator
Simon Gawn Ogilvy And Mather Snr Account Manager
Jennifer Smith Ogilvy And Mather Snr Account Manager
Laura Knight Ogilvy And Mather Account Director
Emily Kelley Ogilvy And Mather Digital Strategist
Rowan Avis Neo@ogilvy Media Director
Barrie Seppings Ogilvy And Mather Creative Director
Heidi Donnelly Ibm Advertising Manager
Carolyn Chan Ibm Advertising Manager

The Brief

Challenge: Tech pros in the B2B world know and love IBM. But these ‘pure geeks’ are no longer getting promoted to the boardroom, where major IT decisions are made meaning that multi-million dollar IT decisions are being increasingly made by people unfamiliar with IBM. Objective: Ensure more CIOs have a deep understanding of, and positive relationship with, IBM. Strategy: Eschewing the obvious route of trying to influence the current crop of C-level executives, IBM decided to play the long game. We set about creating a future generation of executive-level decision makers, equally well-versed in the fields of technology and business.

Creative Execution

Although it’s fun to get re-tweets and it’s nice to be liked, you don’t build a B2B business by building a social fan-base – you do it by building the careers of the people who make buying decisions. As direct marketers used to be fond of saying: it doesn’t matter how many people you reach, as long as you reach the people who matter.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

The Execution: A partnership between IBM, CBS interactive and Charles Sturt University delivered an MBA-level course that helps 50 Senior IT managers make the career leap from the server room to the boardroom. The curriculum was drawn from the University’s online MBA course and designed to augment the IT Managers’ technical knowledge with the management skills they need to pursue a leadership-level career. After the final assessment, the top 10% of students graduated to ‘masterclass’ where they spent 3 months in, one-on-one mentoring with the country’s leading CIOs, generating a long tail of editorial content.

Results

The response to the NextGen CIO program was overwhelming - 300% more than we could handle - as IT managers clamored for a chance to move up the career ladder. As they progressed through the 5 modules and final written assessment, our audience spent over 700 hours literally studying our content and brand values. And, we reached a secondary audience with our content with over 9,000 visits to the NextGen CIO editorial hub on CBSi’s media properties. At the time of writing, 70% of the NextGen CIO graduates had sought to continue the relationship directly with the brand.