A Tale of Two Brands

That challenge--and the way in which marchFIRST is meeting it--is redefining the role of advertising in the branding of technical service and consulting companies.

MarchFIRST's $18 million ad campaign, part of an overall $50 million branding campaign, began in June with commercials running largely on cable television channels. But the company stepped into the national footlights last month when it took its message to the American League play-offs and the two-hour season premier of NBC's hot dramatic TV show, the Emmy award-winning The West Wing.

There, between side-angle shots of actor Martin Sheen in the Oval Office, were 30-second commercials that spoke the name of marchFIRST.

"All of them capture the idea of doing something for the first time," says Jeff Jones, global director of brand management for marchFIRST. The commercials, presented in sepia tones, portrayed reactions to the first miniskirt, the first cubist art exhibition, the first expedition to the South Pole, and man's first walk on the moon--but contained nary a whisper of what the company is about, not unlike many commercials that are aired for consumer products.

"We were trying to portray the human emotion of what happens when you do something for the first time%85to tap into the emotional side of our audience and not hammer them over the head with all these capabilities-driven advertising messages they're used to hearing from companies like us," Jones says.

Rewriting the Rules

MarchFIRST decided to advertise based on quantitative and qualitative research aimed at delivering to an audience the company wanted to reach. In this case, it was not potential clients but potential recruits. The company was interested in raising curiosity about itself and driving the curious to its Web site to learn more.

"The way we identified The West Wing was actually no different than how we have identified any of our media decisions," Jones says.

Cable and network commercials have paid off. Traffic at the marchFIRST Web site rose from 123,000 page views per day in March to 425,000 in the July to August time frame, even before the network commercials aired.

"People used to spend 11-1/2 minutes at the site. Now they are spending 24-1/2 minutes" says Jones, adding that 80 percent of visitors spend their time at the site in the career section. As early as July, the number of resumes being collected at the Web site had risen to 11,000 from 2,700 in March.

When numbers from the fall ad campaign are in, Jones says, the true ROI of the approach will be seen. Meanwhile, he believes the novel approach is rewriting the rules on advertising for technical services. Moving into 2001, marchFIRST will extend its campaign to address potential clients. But its message is still likely to be a bit unconventional from other services organizations.

"We believe there is absolutely a hybrid approach that can be taken between a business-to-business brand and a consumer brand," says Jones, who decries B2B advertising as "pretty predictable, with messages that are abilities-driven and vertically focused."

IT has become so much a part of daily business, Jones adds, that the branding model is moving toward one that is comparable to consumer advertising, which he says is "more emotionally focused and more lifestyle-driven."

Same Take, Different Channel
Jones isn't the only one in the industry who believes it's high time that professional service companies took a cue from consumer advertising. Kathleen Kusek, vice president of marketing at Fort Point Partners, came to the San Francisco company from DDB Branding, a division of Omnicom, where she worked on consumer-goods accounts, including such household names as Clorox and Kellogg's Frosted Flakes.

In crafting a branding program that embraces advertising, Kusek says she deliberately turned to an ad agency that had no previous experience in services.

"We would not have sought an agency focused on services," she says. "The reason is that service firms don't typically have great advertising." The agency she chose, Grand, Scott and Hurley of San Francisco, had done work for Pacific Gas & Electric and the San Francisco Chronicle.

"The vulnerability in brand-building in a services organization is that the product, to a large degree, is the people themselves," Kusek says.

The Fort Point campaign took a more targeted, less expensive approach--one that cost less than $3 million. But, like marchFIRST, it is using quantitative and qualitative demographic research to target the people it needs to reach and craft an effective message to build an awareness campaign that would speak to both potential clients and potential recruits.

"Our overall objective was to achieve what we call 'disproportionate bigness,'" Kusek says. "We said we wanted to be all over the place among that set of people we care about the most. We figured out their concentration in regions around the country, their media habits, and tried to leverage that."

The company image--that Fort Point was a long-term company that could solve a client's "e-selling" problems--was the philosophy founders Matthew and James Roche identified for their company, "even dating back to when it was four guys sitting around a table," Kusek says. "The challenge was how to tailor that sense of brand in a way that's motivating to the target audience."

The result was a series of commercial spots, print ads, posters and postcards. The commercials, aired in the news segments of in-flight video programming on United and American Airlines' coast-to-coast routes and in target executive editions of Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal, spoke to the B2B dilemmas of executives and positioned Fort Point as being there to help.

Print ads with visuals of workers atop the Golden Gate Bridge and Empire State Building ran in technical and professional journals to entice potential recruits. "Were You Born 70 Years Too Late?" it asks, and follows with a message that the digital economy and Fort Point still offer the challenge of getting in on the ground floor.

For Fort Point, the ROI is still being gauged. And, like Jones, Kusek insists that advertising is only one piece of a good branding campaign.

"Communication is a multilevel thing," she says. "It's important to judge things on their ability to drive awareness and their ability to communicate to the target audience."