I always think B2B marketers have it tough. It’s not that easy to do B2B brand campaigns because your target audience is usually a small, niche crowd. That’s why it’s interesting and refreshing to see a brand like Amazon Web Services (AWS) do its first branding campaign — after 11 years! They are the market leaders in terms of cloud vendors (by a large margin!), and yet they have not done any brand campaigns in the past. Perhaps the reason is that other cloud vendors pretty much only got serious and jumped on board in the last couple of years.
Anyway, WONGDOODY, a small agency in the US was the brain behind AWS’s first brand campaign — Build On.
Today’s companies — both startups and enterprises — are filled with doers, dreamers, makers, and innovators who push new ideas and the world forward. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has dubbed these boundary-pushing people as “Builders” and is paying tribute to them in its first global brand launch.
For 11 years, AWS has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 90 fully featured services that are trusted by millions of active customers around the world — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs.
In this campaign, produced by WONGDOODY, AWS doesn’t focus on what AWS does, it focuses on what AWS enables builders to do.
“AWS is the cloud that helps turn builders’ dreams into realities. It goes deeper than the technology —- it wants to champion their ideas and help get them off the whiteboard and into the world,” said WONGDOODY Creative Director/Copywriter Adam Nowak. “Builders are the people who have and will continue to change the world. AWS aligns around their success by giving them the flexibility and freedom and all the tools they need to do that,” added WONGDOODY Associate Creative Director/Art Director Matt Ballew.
In the brand launch commercial titled, “Build On,” AWS business isn’t just cubicles, TPS reports, time sheets and pie charts. It’s hard work, late nights, trial and error, failures, successes and, apparently, a lot of coffee and takeout. AWS shows that a business and doesn’t have to be cold, cliché and robotic. It can be human and evoke emotion. A soulful, inspiring and refreshing angle to take in the category.
The multiplatform campaign includes :60 and :30 network broadcast, digital and social video and a new landing page design. Out-of-home buys in New York, Houston, Chicago, Boston and various airports depict real solutions being worked out by builders on massive whiteboards.
I think this campaign direction is very positive and refreshing, to aim squarely at both the developers/creators, who are the new builders of today. In the past, builders were mostly associated with physical constructions.
Love their microsite: https://www.buildon.aws, and the fact that they are using their own branded top-level domain (TLD).
Their OOH buys ties in nicely with the whole campaign as well, targeting business professionals who travel for work.
Would be interesting to see how they measure the results (or KPIs).