It's not every day one of the largest technology mergers take place. The multi-billion-dollar merger between Dell and EMC introduced the birth of Dell Technologies, a global technology trailblazer helping companies across the world with their digital transformation.
MediaCom was put to the challenge of launching the combined company as a thought leader in the industry. We created a media effectiveness score (MES) which is a calculated proxy for awareness metrics based on audience exposure & interaction with digital media. The score indicates the best performing campaigns, tactics, publishers, and placements against awareness goals at multiple granularity levels. MES along with cost effective measurement metrics (CPMAP, cost per media awareness point) were used as a metric throughout the campaign flight to make optimizations and further inform investment decisions. Our goal was to build awareness across digital by surpassing our CPMAP benchmarks by vehicles (Social, Digital, OOH).
With Dell Technologies being an umbrella brand for the seven companies coming together post-merger i.e. RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream, Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal and VMware, recognizing our audience, Business Decision Makers, was critical to the plan and understanding their interests, passion points, mindset, populous destinations online, etc., was key to building an audience-first go-to-market strategy.
Extensive research on the Business Decision Maker audience identified passion points such as golf, business news and travel indexing high across industries. These findings in turn helped our teams determine different key events and publishers to tap into in order to amplify Dell Technologies' brand awareness.
The overarching approach began with maximizing TV exposure, followed by Digital Video and custom native (content) executions across vehicles to surround our audiences with Dell Technologies presence. Expecting hand-raisers across vehicles to leverage search to learn more, a cohesive search presence against key branded and non-branded solutions ensured findability while maintaining top positioning and kept our brand message top of mind to customers.
High impact Takeovers & TV Campaign
Premium business publications (Forbes, Washington Post and Business Insider) were used to build buzz and momentum leading up to the World Golf Championships. The tournament ran in late March and was the cornerstone of our break-through media launches as our first TV commercials as Dell Technologies launched in the same time frame. MediaCom collaborated with the aforementioned endemic business publications to develop a suite of content consumption forms (articles, testimonials, micro-graphics, blogs and podcasts) to surround our target audience with a visual, interactive story establishing Dell Technologies in this space.
In addition to the takeovers, the launch of our TV campaign provided mass reach through targeted broadcast spots across The Golf Channel and NBC with supporting placements through cable and network news to maintain presence and drive brand re-call.
Social Media & Geo-Targeting
We collaborated with Twitter and PGA for a custom Amplify program extending reach of our videos as pre-roll on PGA video content that increased our exposure against BDMs. MediaCom worked with creative teams to bring the experience of Golf through the Facebook canvas units (immersive full screen mobile experience) housing engaging video and photos. Video tactics and creative re targeting were at the core of our Social execution to ensure we are continually nurturing our hand raisers and taking them through sequential content.
We also executed OOH across key business priority airports in the U.S. Leveraging geo-fence and location based targeting tactics we re-targeted the business travellers exposed to these placements with Banners, Video, and Social executions.
Findability Across Vehicles
A flexible Search spending strategy ensured continued support of core solutions while also gleaning new search interest that aligned with the WGC and TV initiatives. It also drove engaged, lower funnel traffic to specific offerings including Dell Technologies' Trailblazers Podcast hosted by writer and journalist Walter Isaacson and Customer Stories.
Building brand awareness for Dell Technologies was our main priority for the Let's Make It Real campaign, and CpMAP acted as our primary KPI for all media executions (excluding search). While utilizing a video first breakthrough strategy across all digital channels, we finished the year by reaching our B2B BDM audience with a CpMAP 97% more efficient than benchmarks. A true testament to the advanced targeting and multi-channel media presence we put in place at the onset of the campaign.
In addition to measuring each media program by a key digital advertising metric, it was important to take a step back and look at the overall brand health meters. We conducted a brand impact study for the Let's Make It Real campaign, and after the seamless simultaneous launch of our cross-platform campaign at Dell Technologies Match Play last year, we increased vital Dell Technologies brand attributes such as "Brand I Trust" & "Technology Industry Thought Leader" by more than 20 points.
