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Lotus Foundations Ad campaign! is LIVE! Office panics!

Posted by on Dec 9th, 2008 in web 2.0 | 18 comments
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Afterall, there is so much to do when your servers aren’t crashing! ;)

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  • Steph

    Beautiful! Too funny!

  • http://www.vanessabrooks.com Keith Brooks

    very funny, keep the asteroids to yourself in orlando!

  • Roland Reddekop

    Puleeze, that’s pathetically laughable. Do somefocus group testing of people who don’t work for IBM or are relatives before unleashing this WMD into the wild.

  • http://www.Bilal.ca Bilal Jaffery

    Roland, focus group testing was done. It had to be CORNY and it is from tehcnology firm, so we have to keep that in mind as well.

    As long as your confused enough to talk about it, my purpose is done. It is the first in the series. You will see a clearer picture as other ones are out. It was a intro piece and it is doing what we want. ;)

    Confusion, pondering, WTF!

  • Roland Reddekop

    aha, so I got unwittingly sucked in and my very commenting upon it verifies its success or something like that. There we go.

    But I can’t send it to any of my friends or they’ll throw rocks at me and that would hurt…but again, that very reaction would prove its purpose is accomplished. There we go.

    I’ll need to watch the next one with a more wary eye in case I’m hoodwinked again. :-)

  • Christian Tillmanns

    I can see the normal IBM schema.
    “Don’t talk about a product!”
    I hope, I truly hope my prediction about the impact of that spot is completely wrong. Do you remember the collaboration spot from this summer? Do you remember the reaction on ed’s blog? Let’t wait until THAT audience sees this.
    BTW I do not agree, if confuses people they just forget about it.

  • http://dvirreznik.blogspot.com Dvir Reznik

    Very cool Bilal !

  • Scott Hooks

    I must now have a Foundations server for my small business because of this commercial! Err… Not so much. I love the product, but I can’t see this ad actually driving any revenue. Sorry.

  • Graham Dodge

    It’s corny and amusing enough to make me watch the next one and there’s certainly some potential plot hooks in there (young intern unable to make the server work) but I certainly won’t be sending that link to someone currently looking at buying LFS. Maybe videos 2 and 3 will have a bit more direction.

  • brandon weber

    Yup, in agreement that I wouldn’t send this to potential clients to explain anything about what LFS/NITIX does. They’d be wondering what I was smoking.

  • http://www.charlandgraphics.com Greg Charland

    Meh.

    It’s better than any ads Microsoft has put out in the past 2+ years. That’s not saying much.

    I’m hoping the future installments will be more to-the-point. The challenge is to make something that’s funny, informative, compelling and watchable.

    I admit that’s a tall order.

    That’s why you guys get paid the big bucks! :-D

    -Greg C

  • Christian Tillmanns

    … I think you have seen the comments at Ed Brill’s blog. Especially Nathan Freeman … and I would say this time he had one of his nice days.
    I had a discussion yesterday at an IBM event and sorry, the opinion was unison. Don’t show this your customers. The whole Lotus community has tried for years to explain IBM how SMB marketing works.

  • http://www.bilal.ca Bilal Jaffery

    I love it, I absolutely love it that you guys are talking about it and bothered by it. It is a VIRAL campaign and is designed for brand awareness.

    It is not designed to compliment sales presentations, it is rather designed for non-IBM and not IT folks to know and be curious about Lotus Foundations.

    From the views its generating, around 35K in less than 48 hours, I can bet that its causing serious stir in the market.

    I mention this again that this ad is not designed to provide a complete message nor it is designed to compliment a sales presentation. (Although those are coming shortly as well).

    Comparatively, this campaign has already kicked serious ass when compared to social media viral campaigns from other firms.

    Viral campaigns are VIRAL for a reason. This is the new IBM. ;)

    More to come! Thanks again for the curiosity and love!

  • Christian Tillmanns

    … and the funny thing is. The local Lotus Software boss told the audience of 200 BPss, that IBM depends on our knowledge to penetrate the SMB market …

  • Christian Tillmanns

    It is not a Viral campaign. It doesn’t interesse anybody outside IT/Lotus. And there is definately no love from my part behind it.

  • http://www.bilal.ca Bilal Jaffery

    Sprite viral ad that I love -

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUzhFP_4ibc

  • http://www.bilal.ca Bilal Jaffery

    Christian,

    I agree with that as well, we rely on our BPs to penetrate the market.

    We are just trying to create Web awareness around the product. If it even gets few people talking about Lotus products in a Microsoft heavy market, my job is done.

    There will be full complete *to the point* web ads/tv spots in the future as well, something that a BP can use for their presentation.

    However, this was designed to be viral – as in just to get the ‘brand name’ out there to general public and from the views that its getting, general public is liking it.

    I cant just ask Google/Youtube to increase view counts. ;)

  • Brian Ackerman

    I checked the website, and followed the link, so I think I get it. Businesses have a lot to worry about. Foundations takes the worry away. But I don’t think folks will get that unless they do a lot of research and connect the dots. I can only assume there is more coming. 40k views is great, but only if the right people are seeing it…

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