2014 Gold Business to Business

How did the campaign make a difference? Outside of IT, IBM can be seen as ‘of the past’ amongst decision makers. The point of this campaign was to generate interest in IBM in a new light.

By highlighting IBM’s innovation in new technologies – data analytics, social, mobile and cloud as technology partner at the Wimbledon Championships.

Promotion of IBM’s innovative role at the Wimbledon Championships generated real interest within the target audience on-line content and followed through to hard business results – with a campaign ROMI of 17:1.

Strategy IBM needed to become part of a younger audience’s world – from the C-Suite to a developer in a start-up. The campaign set out to show the company’s innovative reality, revealing how it delivers at the frontier of new technologies including data analytics, social, mobile and cloud.

The overall idea was to show ‘Tennis made with IBM’ – to flag that IBM is absolutely relevant to a delivering the Wimbledon Championships.

The Championships, where IBM has been technology partner for the last 25 years, provide a great case study in action and allowed IBM to approach its audience as tennis fans, not business people, to bring innovation ‘proof points’ to life in a sporting context.

The heart of the media strategy was social. The ‘proof points’ became animations and were uploaded to YouTube, posted on Twitter and seeded through banners and the Wimbledon Championships Instagram feed.

Creativity How did the creativity bring the strategy to life?

Dispatches from the Championships were created as real-time animations to be shared socially – each demonstrating IBM’s innovation in an intriguing and relevant way to decisionmakers in a tennis fan mindset. For example, IBM used predictive data analytics in realtime to highlight what a player needed to do to win a match, identify the players with the highest sentiment score (using social analyisis) and show the players with the fastest serve.

A customer journey was created to take anyone interested to an IBM campaign page to understand the innovation from a business perspective.

For the first time, a specially recruited, motivated, trained and ‘launched’ collaborative team – nicknamed ‘The Punnet’ – was set up across IBM to seed the animations.