Know Your Enemy

Background

MessageLabs are the world’s leading messaging security specialist. They ensure the safe transfer of email, instant messaging and web data for some of the most security-minded organisations in the world, including banks and governments. Historically, MessageLabs have behaved like any typical technology company, using trade exhibitions and advertising to build their reputation and to generate sales leads from the business sector. Rapier needed to make MessageLabs famous in a market of bland faceless IT companies.

Idea

The agency began with an exhaustive audit of the competitor landscape. Next, they embarked on a process to get under the skin of MessageLabs by interviewing 16 people from across the organisation. These two exercises generated two significant insights. First, that MessageLabs’ technology and people make it a genuine market leader and that these people have created an amazingly passionate culture whereby everyone who works there shares a belief that they come to work to battle with cyberspace’s bad guys. The second insight was that the media had a huge problem reporting on the whole area of cyber crime. Whilst attacks on governments and corporations have become more and more common, each time they are reported the stories have no visual imagery to help illustrate the nature of the viruses, spam, Trojans and phishing attacks involved, and thus fall back on standard reference images of computer screens or tangled cabling.

Rapier’s solution was to re-frame the problem. They set out to create a raft of imagery that brought alive the complexity of the various cyber threats in a format that would allow MessageLabs to become the undisputed experts in their own industry and a first port of call for quotes and imagery for the media. The agency enlisted a digital artist and challenged him to turn the computer code from captured cyber threats such as viruses and Trojans into images. He then created a whole new visual language for something that had never been illustrated before. A press and PR strategy campaign launched the whole approach to the IT trade and media simultaneously, using a combination of press, expert wall charts and ‘cyber threat’ art shows, to be supported by new sales literature and an extensive online campaign for lead generation. Internal communications also include T-shirts and screensavers for every member of staff.

Results

Full results for the campaign are not yet available. Beyond sales lead generation, the campaign has so far managed to generate free media coverage in the Metro (full page), the New York Sun, the Economist and various trade publications and online communities.

Target Audience

SMEs and consumers

Our Thoughts

Electron microscopy has allowed us to peer at the bugs that live in our carpets as well as the viruses that give us ‘flu or bilharzia. Rapier simply created visual analogies of those weird-looking germs with computer viruses. It’s the execution of the idea that makes this campaign work for me. If they’d tried to do it on the cheap it would have been awful. But they didn’t. And it isn’t.