its about Me! – What 2 Million IT buyers Have to Say to

The Brands Advertising to Them by Kenny Madden

Quick definition of Advertising: Advertising is a form of communication used to

encourage or persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to continue or take some

new action. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive behavior with respect to a

commercial offering.

Over the last 3 years I have had the opportunity to see all the good and bad of IT

technology advertising.

My opinion is irrelevant so let me pass you off to the thoughts and comments from some

of the 2 Million IT Technology buyers I asked How, What, Where and Why Advertising

can work but fails so often:

· We are a fairly technical bunch of buyers but the words Technology advertisers use in

some of their advertising just does not make sense to me.

· You got 7 seconds maximum, I can’t spend that time trying to work out the meaning of ”

leading cloud augmented reality services with geo -spatial calibration across multiple

heterogeneous environs.” Here’s what me the IT buyer is thinking: “Why should I care”?

· Most ads we see are about a product or about the company that makes those products.

The best ads I see are about the IT buyer and how the product can help them.

· We buyers expect 3 questions to be answered in 10-15 seconds: 1) Who are you? 2) What

do you do? 3) Why do I care?

· When you break down the job role of every IT Professional at every level of their career

the lowest common denominator is that we are problem solvers. I want advertisers to tell

me what problem(s) they help solve. If I have that problem I am very interested, if not the

ads aren’t relevant to me today but maybe in the future.

· Professional, polished, super slick ads look like marketing brochures or clever advertising

just doesn’t do it for me.

· Write an ad that does not sound like an ad. Good advertising is direct and gives me a

snippet of what to expect from that company, product and/or business.

· If you use buzzwords in your marketing I’m going to tune you out or turn you off and

remove you from my list of potential vendors.

· I get bombarded with so many different messages from vendors in a day that is already

significantly interrupted by users and colleagues. I do not have the time to look at

everything. Relationship is the bottom line for me. There are so many vendors, and most of

them I’ve never heard of.

· The most meaningful advertising for me is the recommendations of people I trust, be they

coworkers (in IT), or peers. When I hear from someone else on their experience. If they

had an excellent experience with a given product then I’m going to take a second look.

There is a common thread in all of these comments — The IT buyer is effectively saying:

Tell me something that has me in it! Can you save me time? Save me money? Help me in

my daily job? Answer a question/problem for me?

As Roy H. Williams said in his amazing book “The wizard of Ads” – The Risk of insult is

the price of clarity.

Kenny Madden works in market development at Austin based Spiceworks a growing IT

social business network. By combining free IT management software with a Facebook-like

community, Spiceworks helps over 2 million IT rofessionals to discover, buy and manage

$334 billion worth of technology products and services each year. Kenny can be reached at

kenny@spiceworks.com.