The UK market has over 7,000 agencies, all vying to work with the same top 1,000 brands. The business model they operate is simple; get the big brands, sell them big ideas and generate big bucks. However, with such fierce competition generated by the abundance of choice and marketing channels, the model is being tested to its very limit.

The economic situation businesses now operate in has placed an overwhelming importance on return on investment every cent spent on marketing needs to work hard. A wise marketer once said that 50% of his marketing budget was effective, but he didnt know which half. Today, such comments would be deemed unacceptable, but yet they remain to be murmured. There are simply too many agencies all doing their own thing!

The needs of the brands have changed, the consumer is more complex and the market we operate in is becoming increasingly more fragmented with every day that passes. Agency 3.0 is designed to provide clarity to the marketing communications industry and acting as a voice of reason for the agency industry and for the brands which fuel it.

Brands and agencies have never been mutually exclusive; but are increasingly growing apart. Agency 3.0 will provide a framework for long-term partnerships and survival.

Having been in the industry for over 15 years, Ive worked on well over five hundred brands. The numerous changes the industry has seen in the past five years have been more radical than any change of the past 100. Brands and agencies are continually looking for new ways to ignite the consumer and increase market share. The pace of change has been so rapid that neither brands nor agencies have had a chance to step back and reflect on what is working and whats not.

I speak to brand owners everyday the reoccurring message Im hearing is that weve moved so fast as an industry that many of the most important things about working with an agency are slipping. Margin-pressure on agencies has never been more important, while the demands on the agency from the client have never been so significant a few clients and agencies alike have responded well to the new market conditions, but the vast majority of them havent.

Some big decisions lie in wait for agency heads and owners including agency structures, services offered (disciplines), the role of creativity, payment models and the talent working on the brands business.

With this in mind, Ive decided to carry out a global study to uncover what exactly brands want from agencies. As part of my research Ive interviewed 75 of the most influential brands (with marketing spend in excess of $10bn) to ask first hand and candidly whats working and what isnt. What does the agency world need to do more of and be better at? In addition to this, an online survey has been conducted to provide us with an additional quantitative view.

Trying to do the right thing inevitably leads to solutions which have already been tried. That s what happens when we use a frame of reference based on the past . Instead , we should ask what s the wrong thing to do? The answers might lead to interesting new solutions .

Lets say our brand is a contraceptive, whats the most ridiculous thing we can think up?

What about marketing it to nuns?

Well, thats obviously an outrageous idea; sales would disappear and wed be fired. But think about it for a moment. What if we were able to obtain the backing of an entire convent of nuns? we nuns dont need contraception, but if we did wed choose this brand.. Hows that for an endorsement of product efficacy and safety?

Still a bit scary?

Okay, why not take a cohort of young women using your brand and compare them with a cohort of nuns and show the birth rate is the same.Thats interesting.

Or, thinking of nuns, why not reprise The Sound of Music, this time with only two Von Trapp children. We could then do the same for The Waltons, The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe, Queen Victoria or any famously large family. There. Weve gone from nuns to a campaignable family planning idea in just three steps.

Making a mistake made us think. Its a versatile technique. A friend who writes for television often gets writers block. At these times he says he hates to sit and stare at the blank page. So instead he writes something completely absurd like and suddenly a giant sausage fell from the sky. The giant sausage may not make it into the final script, but dealing with the wrong idea gets him thinking in a much more productive way than simply waiting around for the right idea.

It works because it defies logic. Whenever we follow a line of logic in creative thinking whether its writing TV scripts or ads we are led along the same path as everyone else with a similar brief. Thats why advertising within categories tends to look the same.

Car ads are shot on the same open roads and healthcare ads show the same happy, smiley models because the people behind them have all tried their best to do the right thing.By willfully attempting to do the wrong thing we instantly erase the line of logic, forcing ourselves to follow a different path. The end result must of course answer the brief and serve the brand; there must be a logical argument for the idea. But isnt it much better to post-rationalise an inspired idea than to pre-rationalise our way to a bland one?

T-Mobile was considered a consumer brand that appeals to a young audience (16-25). The challenge for GyroHSR was to change the perception of T-Mobile for businesses and show that they offer as good a service and price plan as their competitors . The resulting insightful campaign positioned T-Mobile as a serious contender within the B-to -B market, and successfully stealing share from the current market leaders.

T-Mobile is a German telecommunications company and mobile phone provider. It recently merged with Orange to become the largest mobile operator in the UK. It provides competitive tariffs on both a pay as you go and pay monthly schemes. The companys key audience is consumer, although a growth market for the operator is the business market.

With it generally considered a consumer brand and its business offering not well regarded, the perception was that it did not offer as good a customer service or price plan as its rivals, Vodafone and O2. Additionally, there is very little awareness to the breadth of T-Mobiles business offering and its portfolio of products and services. The key challenge for GyroHSR was to engage a B-to-B audience and to be taken seriously as a credible mobile provider to valuable business customers.

The overall objective was to increase sales of smartphone handsets on a T-Mobile tariff and drive awareness of the T-Mobile brand amongst businesses. GyroHSR created a campaign to primarily target resellers and T-Mobiles partners, through a bespoke incentive campaign that would make the T-Mobiles offering the first choice to sell over and above its rivals.

With insight showing that 100 per cent of the audience had access to the internet at work and that decided that the campaign should focus primarily on digital media comprising eDM and a dedicated website. The digital platform enables both regular communications with the target audience throughout the duration of the campaign. It also allowed real time tracking of results, the key learnings of which were fed back into the campaign to ensure exponential success.

The campaign was executed through regular communication to the target audience and provided them with the required information they needed to sell more smartphones on the T-Mobile tariff. All partners were provided with sales collateral that boosted confidence and outlined the benefits of smartphone/T-Mobile key benefits. Over the duration of 7 months an email, banner, video and site updates were sent every month.

The outcome of the campaign exceeded expectations, resulting in significant uptake of T-Mobile business contracts. Anecdotal evidence suggests that over three quarters (78%) of sales have been converted from O2 and Vodafone customers.

Our business has changed. The role of marketing is no longer to interrupt con versations , but to contagiously ignite them. To shift brands from broadcasters to participants . We believe that the single biggest thing that we need to remember is that modern marketing is about making peoples lives better.

What does that changed dynamic mean for traditional approaches to strategy and creative. What changes, what remains constant?

The Planners View: Focus on Behaviour and Context
As advertising has changed, so have the roles of strategists and planners. We must go ever deeper in pursuit of human understanding, past traditional approaches to customer research and segmentation, beyond understandings of demographics, lifestyles and attitudes. We have to understand why individuals and groups behave as they do in different circumstances and in different contexts. To gather real understanding and insight that can fuel ideas to truly ignite our clients businesses.

Luckily there are tools, frameworks and research to allow us to do just that.
Behavioural Economics for example, that tells us why social, cognitive and emotional factors mean we dont behave as rational Economic models suggest we should.

Whilst, Identity Economics explains why peoplefacing the same economic circumstances make different choices based on our own identities and the norms we encounter in the contexts of our social, family and working lives.

Academic research in both areas throws up fascinating potential for marketers.
Take the example of consumers in the US and Italy, who were asked to either scale up from a plain pizza base by adding toppings or scale down from a fully loaded pizza by removing toppings. In each country consumers ended up with more toppings and a more expensive pizza in the scale down scenario than in the scale up scenario. A result explained through the Behavioural principle of loss aversion.

Or the experiment that showed consumers who paid a discounted price for an energy drink positioned as increasing mental agility derived less actual benefit from drinking it (measured in ability to solve puzzles) than consumers who purchased and consumed the exact same product but paid its regular price. Thus showing how the actual efficacy of products not just the way they make us feel can be changed by marketing actions such as discounting.

Just a little lateral thinking tells you that such Behavioural insights have a plethora of exciting and profitable applications across sectors, from the car industry to retail, software and beyond.

And how, by understanding the role of Behaviours and contexts more deeply, it becomes easier to identify where marketing and marketing communications can play a role, and have the biggest impact in the new normal.

The Creatives View: Dont Advertise, Connect
We shouldnt ask consumers what they want. They dont know. Instead we must apply our creativity to what they need, and will want, then make sure were there, ready. We must think about utility alongside an idea, and increasingly that utility is the idea.

Branded utility is where the brand creates a commitment to a relationship. Its where the brand creates something thats useful to you, something thats a utility in your life. The consumer will feel more confident with the relationship if the brand will continue to be a part of your life.

For those who have worked in marketing for long enough, weve watched this change happen. The definition of what actually constitutes advertising is increasingly broad. Branded touch points now include everything from an online presence to a smiling customer representative, and the band-aid solution of an advertising campaign is no substitute for a holistic, positive experience. If advertising is the end of the chain, then Behaviour is that chain. It is like the missing string theory in science. Its the one thing that binds all other disciplines, thoughts and channels together.

In advertising we have always created work for people, weve used all the kit in a creatives toolbox to try to connect; story telling, charm and humour, to name a few. They worked really well when all we had to think about was a TV ad or radio slot and they can still work well of course, but with so many channels we need to add a lens of relevance to everything we do.

Relevance is complicated though. Not just because people are technologically empowered as never before, but also because they are human. For every consumer behaviour that can be coldly observed and calculated, there is an emotion and attitude that isnt as easily measured or understood.

Understanding people is where the answer lies. We need to create work that is so valuable and useful that people wouldnt want to live without it.

As custodians of brands, if we can harness, understand and apply Behaviour you will have a greater level of clarity around who will be receptive to a brand. We will know when they will want to listen and where they will want to consume what we want to share. Then if we apply emotion, humour, charm, cultural relevance and attitude, in other words the creative touch to that message, you will have much more relevant, powerful and targeted advertising as an output.

As the VP of Nike has said Were not in the business of keeping the media companies alive, Were in the business of connecting with consumers.

You might have guessed from our front co ver that weve loosely themed this issue around Bonfire Night (or Guy Fawkes Night). For our non-British readers, this is a tradition in Britain and indeed some former colonies which dates back to the 5th November 1605 and marks a failed plot to destroy the Houses of Parliament. To this day the tradition is continued with bonfires and fireworks (and, inevitably , the odd casualty ).

The link between what we do at GyroHSR and the planned blowing-up of Parliament is not as tenuous as it may first seem. Any of you who have the pleasure of dealing with GyroHSR in any of our operations will know that we have a unique, shared language and that one of the key words in our vocabulary is ignition.

The work that we do with our clients across the varied disciplines, geographies and verticals is united by one thing: it is designed to ignite ideas and behaviour. Through investment in rigorous insight and an uncompromising creative approach we produce iconic, challenging work that changes the way people interact with their customers, their products and services.

There are as many definitions of marketing communications as there are Pantone colours, but the one that Ive always liked the most is extremely succinct and reductionist. Its activity designed to change consumers behaviour. Ultimately, thats why countless billions of dollars are spent in our sector every year to drive businesses forward. As a business with much of its origins in CRM and direct response, metrics like demand generation and ROI are part of our DNA.
However, with almost another twelve months under our belts of working in ber-competitive markets, being pushed to up our ante and offer ever more sophisticated and innovative work, the question is: how can a marketer get an advantage? And the answers simple: creativity.

Simple, really, when you think about it. But people often lose sight of this, particularly in the B-to-B space, where we do so much of our business. Forget the old 70s prejudices about trade and tech marcomms! Businesses today are still producing and accepting mediocre or substandard work that wont move the needle, and hiding behind the old excuses about complexity (products, buying criteria, distribution). They are exactly that, excuses. Business buyers dont lack sophistication, they dont drop 30 IQ points in the car on the way to work in the morning!

At the end of the day, creativity is why agencies exist, its why all of us chose this career, and if it isnt, youre in the wrong job and should leave. My CEO recently paraphrased Picasso saying that everyone was born an artist, and life is simply there to corrupt that feeling until nothing is left unless you fight back. And fighting back, thats what marketers need to do in the face of apologetic mediocrity.

Youll read in these pages extracts from a sizeable piece of research that we carried out recently which looked into the future shape of client and agency relationships. Its covered in more detail further on, but in summary its creativity that clients value above everything else in their engagements with agency partners. Its that magic, the unique way of making them and their businesses stand out, and grow. Its what ignites. Budgets may be under continued and sustained pressure, but businesses are spending less on media and less on execution, not less on ideas.

Another significant piece of research weve just carried out (we will publicise it in the next edition of Gyrometrics) looked at the effect of the rising influence of procurement in the sourcing of creative services. One of the most refreshing findings to come from this is that in the most forward-thinking companies, those that truly value their brands and keep them at the heart of their businesses, procurement has advanced way beyond a remit to drive down hourly rates and is instead helping marketers to buy creativity and manage more qualitative outputs that impact their business.

We started this year with a call to arms from our North American CEO Rick Segal, who said that in these recessionary times its the duty of marketers to drive businesses out of their torpor. Its time for marketers of the world to ignite.

In the last decade we have seen a growing trend for procurement’s involvement in the selection of marketing agencies. Hot on the heels of this latest recession, the role of procurement has dramatically increased in importance, and not just within public sector organisations. Here he shares his thoughts on the increasing importance of procurement and its relationship with marketing departments and agencies.

When companies outsource a marketing requirement, the procurement department is becoming increasingly seen as the ‘third’ main stakeholder after marketing and the agency. With Marketing Directors coming under increasing pressure to deliver on ever tighter budgets, often with fewer resources, they are starting to work smarter by utilising the purchasing skills of their very own purchasing departments. Recognising that a buying decision is so much more than purely driving down costs is the first step in accepting there is a better way of working together.

An examination of the power of procurement is in keeping with the ONE theme of this issue, because procurement’s role is very much one of making sure the marketing department and the agency are pulling in the same direction. This relationship and how to create it is perhaps best summarised in the following seven-step process for companies procuring marketing services:

STAGE 1 - An identified need
Have you ever been on your weekly shop without a shopping list and wondered why you bought so much more than you needed or didn’t need? This regular occurrence is due to a lack of planning and a lack of understanding on exactly what your real needs were. Unfortunately, this happens regularly in the work place resulting in waste, blown budgets and very stressful supplier relationships.

Recognising the true needs of you and your company is therefore key to the rest of your buying decision. They should be considered as a form of objective to be achieved rather than a specification that describes the solution. Your “needs” must drive your purchase, not the purchase driving your needs: a creative agency, for example, may actually be one of several different solutions to fulfilling your creative requirements.

STAGE 2 - Specification of services
Translating your written needs into a specification is about balance. A balance between being too detailed that it limits any innovative solutions or being to vague that suppliers are unable to respond.

For services such as marketing, a specification can be difficult to write. The key therefore is to define the characteristics of a successful model for delivering a solution and to determine how best to obtain this information from an agency. We (the client) are looking to be convinced that, without knowing the details to a future campaign for example, the agency will be able to deliver the service we want consistently and regularly.

We don’t want empty rhetoric and a sales pitch. Purchasing’s role is to help Marketing ask the right type of questions and we often act as devil’s advocate by thinking carefully through the responses you might expect. By working closely both marketing and purchasing can develop a clear assessment structure based on the specification.

STAGE 3 - Supplier selection
For a client, supplier selection usually means following this pattern:

1. Can we provide the service/goods in-house (the “make” decision)?
2. If not, then do we already have a supplier who might be able to deliver the service for us?
3. If neither of the above, then we need to find a new supplier (the “buy” decision).

Suppliers come in all shapes and sizes! They can be international or domestic, public or private, financially strong or financially weak. What you will certainly find is that no two suppliers are exactly the same which means every one of them can offer you something different.

The trick is to find the suppliers that will be able to realise your needs and then negotiate the best deal. There are many channels to finding suppliers and these include amongst others trade journals, business networks, references, institutes and the internet.

Brand and reputation will have an impact on whether an agency is added to the invitation list, but even if invited to participate an agency will still need to commit a lot of time, cost and resource to the pitching process.

STAGE 4 - Market approach
“First Contact” with any agency concerning the client’s potential business should be carefully thought through. Will this be a telephone call, a letter inviting them to pitch or a fully blown Invitation To Tender (ITT)? The way you approach the market will have a significant bearing on any subsequent negotiation and consequently on obtain the best deal available.

Be professional at all times. Make sure documents are thoroughly checked and any information provided is correct. Most importantly is not to include anything that doesn’t support your selection process.

STAGE 5 - Negotiation
In negotiations; “If you Fail to Plan you Plan to Fail”, which is true for all parties concerned. As an absolute minimum those involved should be collecting their thoughts under specific headings such as:

• Treatment of numerical data
• Your strengths / The agency strengths
• Your weaknesses / The agency weaknesses
• Variables
• Objectives
• Concessions
• Strategy

The bigger the risks and value then the greater the investment in time you need working through these. It will, of course, involve price and costs but includes a great deal more: even the simple arrangements for placing purchase orders, invoicing and problem escalation need to be thoughtfully agreed. Factors to consider beyond the details of the service will include the reputations of the participants, both as individual people and the business in its own right. Everyone has a different agenda! Knowing what they are can be critical.

The purchasing team’s experience in planning and executing negotiations will be much higher than other departments. Tapping into this experience should be the goal of the marketer.

STAGE 6 - Award/Purchase
The final decision to award a contract must be made with absolute confidence. So from the specification and negotiation stages the assessment and final decision can be completed. It is sometimes amazing just how difficult making the final decision can be, but less surprising when there has been no structure to the selection process. If the right stakeholders have been involved from the start then there will be no surprises. Sadly, you will also find some companies making a decision and awarding a “contract” to an agency only to then ask (for the first time) either Purchasing or Legal to write a contract or finalise negotiations.

A truly organised awarding process is a matter of the correct authority level putting their signature on a contract document and the issuing of a Purchase Order with no more questions.

STAGE 7 - Implementation & review
Just when you think the hard work is behind you, the service delivery begins marking the start of the future marketing/agency relationship. This is the point at which your confidence is dashed or rewarded. Stakeholders previously involved may change and words are transformed into action. Time should be taken to review all the activities to this point and procurement can lead this on behalf of all concerned, including the agency.

All seven stages boil down to confidence: The marketing department needs confidence that an agency can deliver; the purchasing department needs confidence they have the best available deal in the marketplace; and the agency needs confidence the client is right for them.

Philip brown is currently working with GyroHSR on a substantial research project with mba students at Lancaster university business school to look at the impacts of procurement on the commissioning of agency services

When you mention the name technicolor to most people they immediately think of classic hollywood movies. The wizard of oz was one of the earliest big features to be filmed in glorious technicolor and set new standards in colour usage in film. In 1939 the company itself won a special academy award oscar for its services to the motion picture industry and its advances in bringing three colour features to the big screen.

So we were delighted to be given the opportunity, and challenge, of rebranding this Hollywood legend in April 2009. Technicolor was by this stage owned by Thomson Corporation, a large multinational with 20,000 employees world-wide that was needing to relaunch and reposition itself. One of the most significant decisions was that the parent company, Thomson, would relaunch its entire corporation as Technicolor and that meant the dust had to be blown off the Technicolor brand.

The Thomson business covered everything from the creative end of making films, to production management and final distribution. What that really meant was they were involved in everything from producing incredible special effects, film production,
subtitling, ensuring that the films were delivered and archived securely, to their final distribution on DVD or being downloaded safely to viewers set top boxes.

Time was of the essence, so over a long weekend in May 2009 we ran deep dive brand workshops at the Thomson Paris HQ with key employees from across the company’s organisation. Foran intense 72 hours the focus was on getting to the very heart of the company and brand: understanding what really made it special and the challenges it faced in the future. We contrasted this internal viewpoint with external market research on the company, the business and the competitors, to gain yet another perspective.

Our conclusions and recommendations were clear. Technicolor needed to become much more than just a 1930s Hollywood movie company. To successfully relaunch the brand we would have to create a new identity and brand proposition that positioned the company as being at the very leading edge of technological developments to the media, entertainment and communication industries.

During the summer and autumn of 2009 a crisp new graphic identity was developed, tested and refined. Further workshops were held in California examining how we could fully leverage co- and ingredient branding opportunities for the corporation globally.

Technicolor was also responsible for developing some of the most important new digital technologies that generated a vast IPR portfolio, and drove new products, so we also had to consider how we could bring all of these elements into a coherent new product naming strategy. Whilst all this was happening a new internet site was developed in parallel to help launch the new re-invigorated brand.

In early 2010 the new brand was ready for launch and the first step was an intense programme of internal brand engagement, to fully energise employees around the world and to bring to life the new Technicolor brand for them. At the heart of the company was the new strategy platform we had developed that Technicolor Amplifies Ideas and Dreams and central to this was the brand manifesto that set out how bringing people’s dreams and ideas to life was what the company was all about. The new creative platform, where the world gets its wonder’, brought this theme to the very front. Out of the many attributes that the organisation had, emerged three consistent brand values that truly reflected those that drove both the company and its employees, being Diligent, Inventive and Authentic. It was also important to visually demonstrate that Technicolor had moved on as a company, so a powerful new identity was unveiled called Stage, representing the diversity and breadth of the brand offering.

So if you just happened to be on the croisette this year for the Cannes Film Festival you would have seen a very different and even more glorious Technicolor.

Idea generation has never been an exact science. Think about it. How do you come up with a great idea? The answer, in reality is sometimes with great difficulty and sometimes, for an unknown reason, with surprising ease. Like I said, it’s never been a science and that’s the way it should be.

I’ve worked within the creative industry for quite a few years now and my mum still can’t understand exactly what it is I do. "I’m an Art Director Mum. I’m a Creative Director Mum." It seems clear that no matter how simply I try to put it and how intently she listens the whole ‘creative thing’ is a bit of a mystery to some people.

We all cope with developing our ideas in different ways. For some it involves looking at as much material for inspiration as they can. Others prefer to lock themselves away and stare into space. I know someone who runs for his ideas. Literally, the process of running helps him focus his mind in a way that delivers interesting, creative thoughts. Mine often come to me while driving in the car. The point I’m making here is we all have our own different ways of developing our creative thoughts.

The old agency model used to rely on putting teams of people together (usually based around a Copywriter and Art Director) that way you get the might of the pen and the drama of the visual working together right? Makes perfect sense and utilising this model has served the creative industry well over the years.

However, our world is changing and fragmenting so quickly now that creative businesses are exploring and developing new models for idea generation that take into consideration the complexity that communication is going through at the moment.

Christoph Becker our CCO has been instrumental in developing and driving through our business a new way of developing our thought processes and finding ways to generate ideas that are relevant, simple and impactful. We call it the Ignition Process. This process is designed to utilise thinking from every discipline within the agency structure. So instead of idea generation being owned purely by the Art Director and Writer, now it’s developed by Planners, Designers, PR experts, Digital Programmers, Strategic people and yes, Art Directors and Writers too. When you have such a wide range of expertise, viewpoints and disciplines all taking responsibility for idea generation you end up with an array of exciting and interesting thought.

Of course all these people need parameters and a channel for their thinking in order to ensure that nothing gets wasted or lost by not being relevant, strategic or focused. To spark the thinking process and ensure collective relevance we all work around a single expression of thought we call The Ignition Point. This is a distillation of all the strategic planning, market analysis and client challenge. Christoph Becker describes the Ignition Point as a spring board. Something that propels all that strategy to somewhere interesting, exciting and ‘Igniting’. It holds all the creative ideas together uniting them across any discipline and provides the kind of impetus that inspires creative thought.

There is one other ingredient within our Ignition Process that is a big shift in attitude and process. That is the move from ‘directing’ the creative process to one of ‘curating’ it. Curation is very different to direction. Curation makes complete sense when you consider a multi-discipline approach to idea generation. Curation is about organisation, identification and collection, rather than simply providing direction. It’s more collaborative, more focused and much, much more rewarding.

CONSIDERING TODAY’S INCREASING FRAGMENTATION OF COMMUNICATION GENERALLY IT MAKES TOTAL SENSE TO WORK IN THIS WAY

Gone are the days when we develop a great idea and think about how it can flex into different channels like digital or PR. Now when ideas come flooding out of the agency we get thinking that has been conceived for the digital space by digital people, or the PR space by-yes you guessed it-PR people. It’s pretty unsurprising then that our thinking works brilliantly within these spaces simply because the ideas have come from people who are passionate, committed and very knowledgeable about their own area of expertise. It’s fair to say working this way has changed us (for the better I’m happy to say). It’s made us more open, it’s made us explore things we maybe wouldn’t have done before. It’s also made us a more interesting place to work I believe. Less hierarchical and more inclusive. So here’s to being open to changing the way we do things and long may curation live.

I’ll be having Sunday dinner back home soon. Mum will probably do her usual roast chicken and I will probably try explaining "I’m a curator Mum".

Based in palo alto, ca, vmware is the global leader in virtualisation. Vmware technologies is the driving force in the emerging market known as cloud computing. With a large transformation occurring in the market, robin matlock, vice president, corporate marketing at vmware, knew the time was right for a new marketing campaign.

“VMware’s virtualisation technology is enabling companies to deliver IT in a much more optimal fashion,” said Matlock. “We identified the need to reach a more senior-level audience who may not be as familiar with VMware as mid-level IT managers are.”

The objectives for the campaign were twofold: (1) to increase awareness of VMware with CIOs and their top staff in commercial and enterprise accounts, and (2) to position VMware as a critical, enabling player in cloud computing.

“The new effort wasn’t without its share of challenges. But GyroHSR remained committed to producing an effective finished product and never lost sight of the ultimate goal,” said Matlock. “The GyroHSR team was very resilient and kept striving to make the campaign better and better. We now have a campaign that we are really excited about - on a global level.”

“Move Beyond” illustrates how VMware is pushing the boundaries of traditional IT into the future by transforming the way in which IT serves the business. Moving beyond means moving past the limits imposed by the cost and complexity of today’s IT infrastructures. Visually, the campaign builds on strong VMware branding elements to depict VMware’s new IT approach and the pragmatic path to the cloud it provides to its customers.

The campaign was launched to senior business IT and senior IT influencers through an integrated approach including print, online, events, out of home (OOH) and social and is scheduled to run through the end of the 2010. Although it’s still too early to share the level of success in the market, initial results are very positive. The team at GyroHSR built a sophisticated graphical dashboard to ensure a comprehensive view of the results of the campaign on an ongoing basis. The dashboard provides data on up to ten key metrics - both on a campaign aggregate level and broken down by region (North America, EMEA and APJ). Additionally, groups within VMware have embraced the campaign - incorporating the theme and creative into their own work and the way in which they talk about the company.

“There is no question that ‘Move Beyond’ has been met with great support,” said Matlock. “The team at GyroHSR can be proud of the campaign they developed and we are looking forward to seeing strong results throughout the rest of the year.”

The aim of the ‘move beyond’ campaign is to bring to light the benefits of cloud computing while positioning vmware as the leader in cloud computing for enterprise it in a way that helps the brand own the desktop virtualisation market in 2010

In the inaugural version of the Channel Insights series, Scott Gillum, SVP of Channel Marketing discusses how industry leaders are recognizing the opportunity to create a sustainable competitive advantage by evolving to the new collaborative partner-marketing model.

In nearly every industry, business partners play an important role in a companys distribution and go-to-market strategy; and no industry relies on partnership channels more than hi-tech. Third party sales channels from independent agents to independent software vendors (ISV) are essential for reaching key market segments like small and medium businesses (SMB) and for developing new innovative solutions.

Traditionally, the hi-tech industry has had a love-hate relationship with partners. They are recognized as an important channel to key customers on one day, and then a needy, never satisfied problem child the next. And the partners themselves often have a conflicted perspective that may be fueled by confusion and frustration from inconsistent in-channel marketing programs, sales compensation policies, and territory or customer ownership issues.

Recent economic conditions, coupled with new technology trends for example, cloud computing and shifts in customer buying behavior have pushed partner channel relationships at the forefront of corporate strategy.

As a result, companies are taking a fresh and honest look at the state of their relationships with partners. Industry leaders are intent on improving partner relationships by building a more open and collaborative environment of common objectives, reward system alignment, and real time information sharing.

The Channel Marketing practice has created a new educational series, including white papers and webcasts to provide greater insight into the changing role of channel marketing and how best-in-class companies are responding to this change, adopting new practices, and putting forth a new attitude that enables partner success.

For a copy of the Channel Insight white paper, please register for the live webcast by June 15th 2010 at www.gyrohsr.com/channelforum. The webcast is scheduled for 12 PM EST on June 16th 2010 and will include a presentation and discussion of channel marketing in the technology industry. The event will be co-hosted by Scott Gillum, SVP and Channel Marketing Practice Leader and Bob Ray, President of the San Francisco office.