Advertising Consulting for ASC

ASC, a company that specializes in retirement plan software, documents, and training, wanted an advertising campaign for a conference they would have a booth at, as well as for general marketing purposes. They came to me to design a campaign of print and video advertisements that would "sell the sizzle, not the steak" of pension administration software. Now, while some might think "pension administration software sizzle" is an oxymoron, for pension administrators there is apparently sizzle to be sold. The problem is that pension administration software is incredibly complicated, and a lot of the sizzle is in the details... details I couldn't possibly understand.

Case in point, I've been making videos for ASC for over a year. I've also been making movies for an all Spanish website. While I don't speak a word of Spanish, I actually understand more of the videos in Spanish because at least Spanish sometimes sounds like English, which is not true of pension administration software.

ASC's point about selling the sizzle was that consumers in their market already know what ASC does (i.e. the "steak") and so the sell had to be about how ASC doesn't just do all this complicated stuff, but they make it easier. Their software is (apparently) easy to use, fast, and they have great tech support.

The first thought I had was to look at Oracle's advertising. Why? Because I have no idea what Oracle does other then that it has something to do with computers and that they are the leader in whatever it is they do. How do I know that? Because their commercials don't tell me anything about what they do, they just show how cool they are. They do this because what they do is complicated, and they don't need to explain it to consumers in their market. The consumers know them, know what they do, and just need to keep hearing how cool Oracle is, which is exactly what we wanted for ASC.

What I also liked about Oracle's campaign was that it was super minimalist, as if they are saying, "we're so awesome we don't even bother trying to show off how awesome we are... Awesome, huh?" The other reason I wanted something minimalist was that the conference was only a few weeks away and we needed to make videos and print advertising which meant we needed something easy to execute in short order.

The result is ASC's "Click" Campaign: Ask what it sounds like to perform a complex task which usually can take hours or days of work. Then answer the question with a "Click." It tells you ASC makes it easy, ASC makes it fast, and the rest is commentary.

We made several short videos that played on a loop at the conference on a giant HD screen as well as print ads and screen savers. Below is an example of a video. I posted the shortest one as they all followed the same format, though some had more clicking. Since it was designed to play on their giant HD screen you can't read the details of the software here. Though, even if you could, I'm not sure how many of you would understand it anyway.