F5 Networks
Company: F5 Networks, Seattle, WA
Company Description: F5 Networks, the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), ensures the secure, reliable, and fast delivery of applications. F5's framework enables innovation that helps organizations enhance IT agility. F5's vision of unified application and data delivery redefines the management of resources, streamlining application delivery and reduce costs. For more information, visit www.f5.com.
Nomination Category: Marketing Awards Campaign Categories - Industry
Nomination Sub Category: Marketing Campaign of the Year - Computer Hardware
Nomination Title: F5 Manifesto Campaign
Tell the story of this nominated marketing campaign for the judges (up to 500 words). Describe the genesis, planning, execution, and results to date of your campaign. If applicable, remember to describe what's unique or innovative about your campaign:
Load balancing has been the bread and butter of F5’s business since it started
in 1995, and F5 has long been recognized as the leader in this fairly narrow
market within the IT industry. But F5’s product portfolio has expanded in
recent years to provide a much broader set of solutions to critical IT
problems. For Fortune 500 companies and enterprises worldwide, F5 offers a
strategic approach to addressing difficult and costly infrastructure challenges
in security, storage, virtualization, and cloud computing.
When customers don’t know about F5’s full capabilities, they are missing out on
fundamental ways they can better serve their businesses. When F5 doesn’t sell
its full capabilities, it’s leaving money on the table.
The F5 IT Manifesto Campaign was created to reposition F5 as a forward-thinking
IT solution provider rather than a niche load balancer company. Customer
research showed that although the company was well-regarded among engineers
using F5 gear for its technical merits, director-level IT professionals did not
understand F5’s potential value to their businesses. This audience has
tremendous responsibility to make decisions that keep their businesses running,
and F5 needed to speak to their concerns at the business level.
The campaign establishes a core set of principles that challenge common
assumptions about how significant IT problems can be solved. To someone outside
the industry, the problems addressed may not mean much, but to IT
professionals, they are relentless, expensive, and often assumed to be more or
less unfixable.
F5 executed the campaign throughout 2010 in booth graphics and program
advertising at dozens of trade shows worldwide, in print and online ads in IT
trade journals, and on the corporate website. Using bold, direct statements and
graphics, F5 addressed the audience as a trusted IT business advisor rather
than with typical technical specs and features.
In recent years, the analyst firm Gartner and others regularly commented on
weak marketing as a vulnerability for F5, despite the company’s consistent
ranking as the market leader in analyst reports. In August 2010, several months
after the campaign launched, Gartner gave F5 its first positive marketing
rating in years. The report stated that “dedicated, outbound marketing has
helped sharpen the F5 message” and that the new messages “….position F5 to have
the types of discussions that will accelerate its business and increase its
position in next-generation data centers.”
These strong, consistent marketing messages were a major factor in the success
of F5’s 2010 marketing programs. Over the course of 2010, F5 saw a significant
increase in the percentage of its sales pipeline that is directly attributable
to marketing activities, from 2.98% in Q1 to 12.80% in Q4. The return on
investment for each marketing dollar spent increased from $5.5 in Q1 2010 to
$16.7 in Q4 2010. To put this in the context of the company’s overall growth,
F5’s revenue grew 35% in FY2010.
In December 2010, F5 conducted a qualitative survey that showed the campaign
had improved awareness of its broad solution set and expanded its reach with IT
organizations.
List hyperlinks to any online work samples, videos, images, presentations, news stories, press releases, or other documents that support your case. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:
Work samples were emailed separately.
Provide a brief biography of the leader of the team that planned and executed this marketing campaign (up to 100 words):
Kirby Wadsworth, Vice President of Global Marketing, has more than 25 years’
experience developing and implementing breakthrough strategies for emerging and
established companies. He joined F5 through its acquisition of Acopia, where he
served as Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. Prior to
Acopia, he was pivotal in creating the continuous data protection (CDP) market
at Revivio, and he previously played a key role in several other significant
data storage industry transformations.
Kirby graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern University and received an
MBA with highest honors from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at
Northwestern University.