Happy As A Pig In CISCO

The Client:
Brocade is a data networking and storage appliance company. Think Cisco – but smaller. A lot smaller.

The Brief:

As said by the client, “There is anti-Cisco sentiment out there. We want to capitalize on that, and take it back to Cisco. Aggressively. We want to gouge their eyes out. Any questions?”

Well, ok, there was more. The main objectives were to improve overall awareness and consideration of the Brocade brand, and to highlight the fact that Brocade have a competitive, if not superior, product to that of Cisco. Brocade were tired of side-stepping around the giant. They were ready to be the underdog aggressor and were willing to use a provocative and irreverent approach more typical of a consumer brand. Brocade wanted attention. Actually, they needed it. Both their industry and market positions were slipping.

Fantastic! I was thrilled to be given such charter and such freedom. With the gloves off, I felt that I could create an attention getting campaign that would create long lasting chatter and resonance within the industry – all of it beneficial to Brocade.

The Manifesto:

We’ve all been here:

That time you bought a new shiny thing. Only to discover that to get the best from it you had to replace or upgrade everything else it touched.  And, when all was said and done, you’d spent more than twice as much just to get it to work as advertised.

When you made your purchase decision based on the size of the brand.  Big is better. Big is safe.  Right?  Only to later find out that ‘Big’ doesn’t always mean ‘Best’.  It never does (unless it’s an ice cream cone).

When you got seduced by that rich feature set.  Pages of glorious labor saving and coffee making features.  Turned out that you only really needed a couple of them – and the rest just got in the way and made the whole thing unreliable and unnecessarily expensive.

Been there?  Yeah.  Of course you have.  You’ve been C!$CØ’ed.

CISCO ATTACK CAMPAIGN. PART I.

To take Cisco – the name – play on it, push it and shove it a bit, and to use it in place of a swear word. As profanity, a blaspheme, a cuss verb. Using only the name/word and a URL/Link we would start with a grass roots guerilla campaign (online and offline) introducing beaten-up and downtrodden IT folk. At this stage, there would be no mention of Brocade, as the intent was to create mystery and to get people talking.

The URL would resolve to a website that would reveal the definition, and show examples of how folk had been completely, utterly and royally C!$CØ’ed (not necessarily having anything to do with, having, or using, Cisco product).

Participation encouraged (with the goal of propagating the term C!$CØ’ed). Imagine the social possibilities.

CISCO ATTACK CAMPAIGN. PART II.

Having allowed the teaser to have run for several weeks, we would then launch the second phase that brings it back to Brocade. Showing how Brocade can take care of your C!$CØ’ed situation. Brocade the hero.

It was all going delightfully until the legal department got nervous about the way in which we had messed with the Cisco word-mark. Deconstructing it with symbols (the exclamation, etc) may be considered tampering with private property.

It’s not that it couldn’t be defended. It’s just that the client legal team didn’t want to be put in the position of defense.

Fair enough.

So, we changed things up. Slightly. Still with hint of profanity, but less of a verb and more of a noun. And this time, not messing with the word-mark at all.

CISCO ATTACK CAMPAIGN. PART III.

When Cisco turns to Sh!T.

All this, and then the client lost their nerve. They elected to stay the course with their tired three year old campaign.

A shame really.

Brocade needed to (still needs to) shake the industry. You cannot do so without taking a risk. There are risks inherent with this campaign – as there are in all great campaigns. We believe, absolutely, that this campaign would have set them on the path to achieving greater mindshare, greater awareness, greater consideration, and ultimately, greater sales.

Oh well. [sigh]

THE END.

[Note: This is a campaign that never ran. Final ad units were never created. The ad units displayed on this page are in the form of what we like to call ADLOBS (AD-Like-OBjectS) and are for the sole purpose of expressing the idea and testing the creative. Consider them agnostic. Were they to make it into production, they would be re-cut, reshaped, and redesigned to take the form suitable, and relevant, to the chosen medium (albeit online, print, video, outdoor, etc).]