The No-Ad Formula

Michael Krauss may have written the book on high-tech services TV advertising, but as chief marketing officer at Diamond Technology Partners, Chicago, he's writing some new chapters.

More than a decade ago, Krauss, 47, launched the industry's first intensive TV advertising campaign to broadcast the merits of Arthur Andersen's technical consulting division--the business that became today's Andersen Consulting.

"They had a truly great business, but folks at Arthur Andersen said the consulting firm 'was the best but not the best-known,'" Krauss says. From a branding perspective at that time, technology services were uncharted terrain. "I wanted to help write the book," Krauss says. So he put Andersen on TV in the first national advertising campaign for a high-tech services company.

That was the late 1980s. Today at Diamond, he's not talking TV. "Our main target is the Global 2000 senior-executive tier, a tier you can reach very effectively through direct communication," he says. "Diamond is all about being at the cutting edge of knowledge and ideas. That's what we think clients are looking for."

That communication is delivered through a series of upscale messages and events sponsored by Diamond, including Context, an independent technology journal edited by former Wall Street Journal bureau chief Paul Carroll and a series of high-level executive industry conferences. Featured in the conferences are the illustrious group of Diamond Fellows,people such as Andrew Lippman, associate director and founding member of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., and Mohanbir S. Sawhney, professor of electronic commerce and technology at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.

"That's really our way of communicating our point of differentiation," Krauss says. "We've done very well in getting the message out."

Marketing is all about enabling the bottom line, he adds. "Everything we do in terms of brand-building marketing is making sure that we strategically position the company," Krauss says. "My advice to anybody in the category is to first assess your strategic marketing objectives, and then use tools that meet those objectives."

Michael Krauss drills down on ad strategies and dot-com excesses. Visit www.varbusiness.com for the full story.