Career Case- Media Integration

Background

• The prospective client is the biggest consumer IT company in the world
• Spends majority of its marketing budget with the competition on account of better media integration options
• The whole sales leadership wants to get proportionate share before a big launch scheduled in the next 90 days

Opportunity

The Account Manager gets an audience with the client’s CMO and its agency. We don’t have a brief but get a hint that they might want to discuss the upcoming big launch. Spend the next week preparing several dummy options to discuss in the meeting.

Meeting 1

The CMO tells us that the big launch is still some time away and wants us to propose a solution for creating a sales pull for their SME product portfolio. All the preparation fall flats and the account manager look at me for a solution. We are offered another coffee and basis some quick brain storming and inputs from the client, the following three propositions emerge.

1. An integrated ‘advertorial’ proposition using the Print, Digital and Radio platform focusing on expert comments on client’s products.
2. A case study based campaign capturing fictional cases of SMEs that failed because of problems that can be addressed by client’s products.
3. An event plan that shall get the client under one roof with over 100 CIO’s of leading SMEs in NCR.

The client wants a formal presentation before they can take a step forward. Phew! That buys us some time.

The Pitch

We study the entire product portfolio of the client with regards to SMEs and track all global/Indian campaigns undertaken by the client in FY10 targeting SMEs. We don’t find much and spend the night fine-tuning the ideas and creating dummies to support the presentation.

Meeting 2

After a brief introduction from the Account Manager, I present all the three propositions to the client from a creative and print-digital integration.

The Result

• The client chooses option2 and we end up with sizeable exclusive business for print, radio and the fledgling internet business.
• We get an entry in the client and get a proportionate share of the upcoming launch 3 months down the line.
• I establish a rapport with the agency and the client and end up doing two freelancing assignments for them while doing my MBA. (20% of my MBA fee is earned)