HEY I LOVE THAT COMMERCIAL!!! Now that would be a powerful commercial! There is so much that NOVL could take off from that plot. You should be in advertising.
How bout instead of "How do you reboot", the non-Novell administrator sitting in a room filled with call-center staff would say in a frustrated voice "Which User ID do you want to reset the password on? Your file server, email, internet, application, mainframe, ERP? All of them?!?!? Sorry - I can't change all of them - you will have to talk to Jim,Mary,Sam,Scott for your other password changes - ohh by the way, Jim & Mary are on vacation". Then cut to the Novell System Admin in a small quiet peaceful room while (s)he is having a cup of coffee "Hello, may I help you? You would like to reset all your passwords? Sure - one second - there you go they all have been reset for you. Anything else I can do for you?". Then thinking to himself after the call "hmmmm... where would I be without Novell's NDS".
I know that NOVL has been asked by countless people "Why dont you advertise on TV". They give the same set of excuses. Too much money and it does not specifically hit their target. Sorry folks, but your real target are those that don't want to have you in their office anyway because they are convinced that there is no need for NDS or Novell (its a dead company - right). Print ads wont work for the most part becaue - I don't know about any of you - I tend to quickly skip past most print commercials that are not telling me of a SALE. All other commercials are bogus and I ignore them.
NOVL has to get the ear of these non-converts that won't give them the time of day any other time. TV Commercials are a powerful way of doing that. A good commercial will even be talked about at coffee breaks (if its done just right). A TV Commercial is normally something a majority of TV-Watchers will not ignore sooner or later (they can't be bothered getting off their butts).
They do not understand what more and more Tech companies are figuring out - overall mindshare is as important as targetted mindshare. Lucent has simply start to advertise just their logo and company existance - nothing more. We all know how IBM has been extremely successful in advertise on TV to put a human perspective on "e-commerce". DEC (when they were DEC) advertised just themselves as an entity. And the list goes on and on.
NOVL must seriously consider TV advertising on business shows like CNBC, CNN, CBC NewsWorld, etc. Maybe even some prime-time on the big networks as well. Advertisers can make commercials that will make sense out of Directory Services. They can humanize it. They did it to "e-commerce". They can also associate DS to NOVL&NDS.
I am afraid that NOVL's corporate marketing VP is too conservative and stuck in the mud with some ideas he has to consider things like TV ads. Hell, he even goes out to the public and broadcasts to the world that "We still have to figure out what we are going to do with Digital-Me". I'll tell you that I have talked to many NOVLers and I have yet to hear any of them speak kindly to their opinions of Slitz. Based on what I have heard from him, I can see why they dont trust that he knows what he is doing. I only wish Schmidt would see that he is not good for NOVL. He cannot run at Internet Speed with the likes of Schmidt and Stone.
Just My Opinions. I'll get off my soapbox now.
Toy |
