Case Study Print advertisement: ‘Penny Black’
Revolutionary.
The Penny Black, the world’s first adhesive postage stamp.
Counter revolutionary.
Postal retail counter automation
For retail counter automation that can evolve your business model and give your postal organisation a competitive advantage, call Ascent Software on (+356) 2132 2209 or email sales@swiftpostal.com or visit www.swiftpostal.com
How to build a high profile brand in the European and global software markets. The extraordinary response to this ‘Penny Black’ ad by C-level executives worldwide created a welcome business result for the client. This was the first in a series of three print ads for the Swift product line for the trade magazine Postal Technology International (PTI) in 2010 and 2011.
The Issue The key issue was to develop an effective product repositioning of Swift software that had, hitherto, enjoyed only moderate postal industry coverage through Ascent, the software house. Other issues involved finding ways to project the strength of this comparatively new postal industry offering, albeit from a new brand that was relatively unknown to
the international postal community. If this could be achieved successfully, Ascent believed that the quality and scalability of the Swift Postal solution could be adopted as a postal industry benchmark since the algorithms developed in the 1980s by their main competitor to shorten data transmission times had been superseded by the internet.
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The Challenge The Brand Challenge was to establish the presence of the comparatively new Swift Postal brand as a major software technology solution in a highly competitive, worldwide industry. To achieve this, Ogilvy Malta built the long-term Brand Image of Swift Postal as an innovative and dynamic brand that would fundamentally change the post office business model. One further challenge: advertising had never been used before, so this assignment represented a critical placement of trust in Ogilvy Malta by Ascent. The Creative Idea The advertising objective was to establish a dramatic presence in the postal counter automation market through Swift’s software capability. Ogilvy’s advertising solution was to expose the legacy postal system for what it was: old-fashioned, inefficient and labour intensive when compared to the easeof-use and efficiency of Swift’s software solution. Ogilvy Malta used the Penny Black stamp created in 1843 as a representative symbol of the traditional postal counter technology juxtaposed against the hi-tech graphic appearance of Swift Postal’s product identity as representative of the software’s advanced, product performance potential. The headline read: ‘Revolutionary’ above the Penny Black image and ‘Counter Revolutionary’ above the Swift Postal
brand identity, thereby expressing the fact that both the automated postal developments shown were revolutionary for their day but with an added twist in the word play demonstrating Swift Postal’s specific area of counter application. The Campaign The advertising needed to not just develop awareness of Swift’s presence in the market but to build the image of Swift as a dynamic, intelligent software brand. The advertising needed to develop curiosity in and trial of the product by the magazine’s readership of postal company CEOs, CFOs and CMOs. A single page advertisement ran in the Postal Technologies International trade magazine for one insertion prior to the Postal Technologies Fair in Frankfurt in May 2009. The Result Running this advertisement registered results almost immediately. A number of postal operators recognised that Swift offered a possible solution to their legacy problems. One African postal operator as well as operators in South America and the Caribbean expressed their interest in using the Swift Postal platform. To date, approximately €2,000,000 worth of business discussions have been held as a result of just one advertising insertion.
Ogilvy Malta 7 / Big Ben Towers Tower Street University Heights Msida MSD 1822 Malta T (+356) 21 320 880/1 info@ogilvymalta.com www.ogilvymalta.com twitter.com/ogilvymalta linkedin.com/company/ogilvy-malta