Motorola Inc.

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Motorola Inc.

INTELLIGENCE EVERYWHERE CAMPAIGN
MOTO CAMPAIGN

1303 E. Algonquin Road
Schaumburg, Illinois 60196
USA
Telephone: (847) 576-5000
Web site: www.motorola.com

INTELLIGENCE EVERYWHERE CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

Motorola, Inc., began by selling radio accessories in the 1920s, but by 2000 mobile phones were Motorola's highest-grossing product. Even though Motorola was the world's second-largest mobile-phone company behind Nokia, Inc., it was brutally affected by the tech industry's downturn in 2001. Motorola's stock price had plummeted nearly 70 percent in just 12 months. The company also announced thousands of layoffs during the same year. Executives at Motorola believed that the best way to prevail in the new decade was to lead the telecommunications industry with innovative products. In 2001 the company released its "Intelligence Everywhere" campaign, which hinted at what the future would look like with Motorola products.

Motorola awarded its advertising account to the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather New York in 2000. After debuting Motorola print ads at trade shows during March 2001, Ogilvy & Mather launched its estimated $150-$200 million print campaign nationwide in May of that year. The first nationwide advertisement was an eight-page spread that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Each ad featured different appliances communicating to each other with products not yet invented. One ad showed a parking meter sending a message to a Motorola customer whose meter was about to expire. Another featured a refrigerator sending its milk order to a supermarket. One print ad showed an image of a Chihuahua with the copy "I'M LOST." The image of a personal digital assistant (PDA) adjacent to the Chihuahua announced, "I'LL FIND YOU." The ad suggested that Motorola would locate lost pets by using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology.

Motorola reported $30 billion in sales for 2001, a disappointing drop from the $37 billion it had posted in 2000. Other mobile-phone companies experienced a similar decline. Motorola sales dipped to $26 billion in 2002 The company did not post a sales increase until 2003 Advertising critics still praised the "Intelligence Everywhere" campaign for revitalizing Motorola's antiquated image. Others criticized it for catering to "dreamers" and advertising a product that did not yet exist.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In 1928 Paul Galvin founded Galvin Manufacturing, which sold components that allowed radios to use household electrical currents instead of batteries. After the success of the company's motorcar radios, in the 1940s Galvin changed the company name to Motorola. By the 1990s Motorola had begun focusing primarily on the production of semiconductors, telecommunication infra-structure hardware, and mobile phones. The company's advertising account was spread across several ad agencies, and its phones were advertised with an array of taglines, including "W/O Wires," "The Heart of Smart," and "Digital DNA."

Hoping to reproduce the success that International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) had experienced after it consolidated its advertising account to one agency, Motorola awarded its entire account in 2000 to Ogilvy & Mather, which had been creating IBM's advertisements since 1994. "I am impressed by the way IBM was able to reposition its company," Motorola CMO Jocelyn Carter-Miller said to Brandweek. She added that Motorola's future positioning would center on "making things smarter and people's lives better." Because of waning sales, Motorola slashed its advertising budget by 70 percent just six months after signing it over to Ogilvy & Mather.

Between 2000 and 2001 Motorola was forced to reduce its workforce by tens of thousands. Corporate executives believed that the most effective way to increase sales was to release innovative products. As Ogilvy & Mather prepared to launch the "Intelligence Everywhere" campaign, Motorola was planning the release of its A830 mobile phone, which would be the world's first wireless phone to browse the Internet at speeds comparable to that of a cable modem.

Ogilvy & Mather dropped Motorola's "W/O Wires" and "The Heart of Smart" taglines in order to replace them with something more innovative. Also, Motorola did not want the upcoming campaign to contain the word "wireless," which the company considered outdated. As Motorola chief brand officer Geoffrey Frost explained to Steven Burke, a reporter for CRN, "We don't refer to the [early] auto industry as 'horselessness.' Eventually, wireless networking will be second nature."

TARGET MARKET

"Intelligence Everywhere" targeted a demographic of consumers who were interested in how future technologies would affect their daily lives. The ads implied that Motorola would provide the product-to-product communication hardware for futuristic appliances. Discussing the ads with the New York Post, Milosz Skrzypczak, an analyst with the market research firm the Yankee Group, said, "We're talking sci-fi here." Skrzypczak, who was 28 years old, explained that the products featured in the campaign probably would not be available in his lifetime.

The campaign was released simultaneously with premium Motorola phones that were loaded with state-of-the-art features. The Motorola A760 was equipped with Bluetooth wireless technology that could send images and even small multimedia files from phone to phone. "Today, there are more than 1.2 billion mobile handset users—and there is plenty of opportunity for more growth through both new users and those who want to replace or upgrade their handsets. We are focused on building momentum," Tom Lynch, president of Motorola's Personal Communications Sector, said to PR Newswire. "This means winning across all price points by working with wireless operators to innovate, create, and deliver 'must have' products and 'gotta-do' mobile experiences."

Other advertising analysts, such as Mary Huhn of the New York Post, criticized the campaign for limiting itself to "dreamers." The print ads suggested that Motorola products could help appliances such as washing machines read the handling labels on clothes. Unfortunately, the availability of such appliances was not expected for decades, and critics were skeptical about whether consumers would pay a premium price to save a few seconds of their time even if such technologies did become available.

COMPETITION

Just before "Intelligence Everywhere" was released, Nokia held 30 percent of the global mobile-phone market, which was twice the amount that Motorola held. The Finland-based Nokia attributed success to its stylish phones that were easy to use and to its straightforward brand campaigns. The market researcher Interbrand rated Nokia as one of the top five brands of 2000. In Europe Nokia was rated highest in Reader's Digest 's "Trusted Brands" survey. "They built their business on great design and an excellent interface which made the phones very easy to use. They combined that with the brand and I think the brand itself is associated with and perceived as providing the best products," Ben Wood, senior analyst for the research and analysis firm Gartner Europe, told Ad Age Global.

Nokia had been using the tagline "Connecting People" since 1993. By 2001 advertising accounts for Nokia were spread across several different advertising agencies. Grey Worldwide EMEA was responsible for Nokia's advertising for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Advertising in the United States was created by the ad agency the Richards Group. TBWA\Chiat\Day Canada handled Nokia's Canadian account. Most of the campaigns released for Nokia were straightforward and direct. One of the brand's most repeated images was that of two hands reaching for each other. The ad featured Nokia's logo and the tagline "Connecting People." Referring to Nokia's advertising strategy, Caroline Carter, the president of Grey Worldwide EMEA, explained in Ad Age Global, "They have a clear view that it's not about the technology, it's about what the technology does for people."

MARKETING STRATEGY

At the start of 2001 the first print ads for the "Intelligence Everywhere" campaign appeared at the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany. They surfaced again at the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association trade show in Las Vegas. With an estimated $150-$200 million budget, the campaign was released nationwide in May 2001 and first appeared as an eight-page spread in the Wall Street Journal.

The campaign was Ogilvy & Mather's first execution for Motorola since winning its advertising account in September 2000. The agency developed the tagline "Intelligence Everywhere" to suggest that future appliances and objects everywhere would use Motorola technology to benefit people's lives. "It is about capturing the knowledge that's around us and using it wisely to develop products that offer real solutions to the challenges faced by real people," Bob Growney, Motorola's president and chief operating officer, was quoted in Business Wire.

The campaign's ads depicted future technologies at work in home, office, car, and personal-life situations. Each ad was separated into two panels. The left panel featured a single object communicating to an object in the right panel. For one of the campaign's most remarked-upon ads, the left panel featured a carton of milk with the copy "I'M SPOILED." The refrigerator on its right responded, "I KNOW." The ad implied that refrigerators of the future would automatically sense milk's expiration date. Another print featured a sweater beside the copy "BE GENTLE." The washing machine in the right panel replied, "I WILL." Other print ads featured mobile phones communicating with vending machines, computers talking to PDAs (personal digital assistants), and televisions talking to schools.

"Sometimes technology is on a faster curve than the market is ready for," Rachelle Franklin, director of corporate brands at Motorola, said to the New York Post. "What we're trying to express is, 'We'll be ready with relevant technology when you're ready for it.' That's key. It's all about timing."

Another print ad featured a Chihuahua beneath the copy "I'M LOST." On the ad's right panel a PDA resembling a Palm Pilot answered, "I'LL FIND YOU." The ad suggested that future Motorola products could find lost pets using GPS technology. Criticizing the ad, Nancy Gohring, a senior writer with Interactive Week, wrote, "Personally, I think it's kind of weird. How much of a monthly fee will people pay to track pets?"

LITIGATION EVERYWHERE

When the mobile-phone division of Motorola began using the tagline "Intelligence Everywhere" for a 2001 advertising campaign, database-software company MicroStrategy filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court. The Virginia-based MicroStrategy claimed that it had been using the tagline "Intelligence Everywhere" in advertising since 1998. A federal judge later decided to allow Motorola use of the tagline.

Motorola executives wanted "Intelligence Everywhere" to convey Motorola's dedication to a future of seamless mobility, meaning that consumers would be connected wirelessly to conventional objects. Motorola's CEO, Ed Zander, explained the concept of seamless mobility to investors at the company's Merrill Lynch Global Communications Investor Conference in 2004. As a theoretical example, Zander explained that if someone was wakened by a song on his or her radio alarm clock, the song could follow the consumer throughout his or her house on a home stereo system. The music would eventually be transferred "seamlessly" to the customer's car stereo.

Without giving specifics, Dan Burrier, executive creative director at Ogilvy & Mather, explained to Brandweek how Motorola contributed to seamless mobility. "If Motorola becomes the leader of Intelligence Everywhere, then things like Motorola phones become your key into it," Burrier said. "If phones become part of a larger dialogue, then that is an honorable, smarter place to be."

OUTCOME

The "Intelligence Everywhere" campaign enjoyed some advertising success, including a 2002 One Show award, but many advertising critics lambasted the campaign for advertising a technology that did not yet exist. Sales for Motorola in 2001 plummeted $7 billion below its sales figure for 2000. Instead of blaming the "Intelligence Everywhere" campaign, critics cited other factors, such as a widespread slump in the technology sector, Motorola's reduced advertising budget, and the Motorola brand falling out of favor with consumers. Motorola's sales did not improve until Ogilvy & Mather released a subsequent campaign that abbreviated the company's name to "Moto." That campaign would resonate so well with younger consumers that competitor Nokia would be forced to alter its time-tested advertising strategy.

Some ad critics commended "Intelligence Everywhere" for initiating Motorola's transformation into a more stylish and contemporized brand. Creatives at Ogilvy & Mather would use the simplistic messaging of "Intelligence Everywhere" in later Motorola campaigns. "Technology is in a panic mode," Chris Wall, co-chief creative officer for Ogilvy & Mather, said to MC Technology Marketing Intelligence. "People got fat and happy in the late '90s [from the Internet], but now they've written off technology as being a leprosy. Ultimately, what technology has to have is real value. I think simplicity wins."

MOTOROLA MUSIC

IN 2004 the mobile-hone division of the company Motorola unveiled a technology that allowed automobiles to connect wirelessly with home Internet connections. The technology transferred digital music that resided inside a home computer to a car's stereo.

Kevin Teague

MOTO CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

In 1995 Motorola, Inc., dominated the mobile-phone market with 54 percent of the global market share. Over the next few years, however, Motorola was accused of losing sight of its customers' needs and designing unsightly phones with overly complex features. By 2000 Motorola had surrendered much of its business to Nokia, Inc., a company renowned for creating stylish mobile phones with an easy-to-use functionality. To salvage its brand Motorola hired Tim Parsey, who had worked previously at Apple Computer, to head a team to design a new line of premium, stylish Motorola phones. Once the new phones were completed, Motorola released its "Moto" campaign to rebrand Motorola as a fun, creative company with a cutting-edge product line.

In 2000 Motorola had selected the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather New York to handle its advertising. Creatives at the agency's Taiwan office noticed that the local youth, who were unaccustomed to the r and l syllables, referred to their Motorola phones simply as "Moto." Ogilvy & Mather used the moniker to construct the brand's new quip, "Hello Moto," which first appeared in January 2002 for the campaign's Asian debut. The campaign continued in more than 200 countries and included outdoor ads, print ads, and television spots. Spending for the campaign was estimated at $100 million. Initially it targeted 20-something trendsetters. Later the target was expanded to include a much younger demographic. Instead of touting phone features, the "Moto" spots blended contemporary music with fashion to build Motorola's new stylish image. More than 80 print ads were created. Each featured a different "Moto-ism," such as "BANGBANGMOTO," "METALMOTO," and "DIVAMOTO," to convey a new attitude that was surrounding Motorola. The campaign continued until 2005.

Advertising and technology critics praised the campaign for giving Motorola's brand a much-needed revitalization. During the fourth quarter of 2002, "Moto" and the contemporized Motorola phones helped Motorola sales outperform Nokia sales for the first time in four years. In 2005 Motorola's market share had grown more than 5 percent over its market share in 2000.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In the 1990s Motorola products consisted primarily of semiconductors, telecommunication infrastructure hardware, and mobile phones. The latter, the company's most lucrative product, was derided by technology critics for being overly focused on engineering and not attending to the needs of customers. Motorola phones between 1995 and 2000 were criticized for their bulky, unattractive design. "Motorola is a company that listens more to its engineers, while Nokia listens more to its customers," Stefan Daiberl, the director of brand valuation at the consultancy group Interbrand, was quoted in Reuters News.

Motorola executives made decisions between 1999 and 2001 that would eventually improve the company's market share and resurrect the Motorola brand. In 1999 Motorola hired Nike Inc.'s global director of advertising, Geoffrey Frost, to lead Motorola's marketing department. Frost formulated a two-year plan that involved hiring designer Tim Parsey, who had previously served as design chief at Apple Computer, to create a stylish line of Motorola phones. Taking its cue from International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), which had met with success after consolidating its advertising account with Ogilvy & Mather in 1994, Motorola awarded its entire account to that agency.

Ogilvy & Mather first released a print campaign in May 2001 titled "Intelligence Everywhere," which featured objects of the future communicating to each other with the help of Motorola. One ad featured an image of a milk carton below the copy "I'M SPOILED." The refrigerator appearing on the adjacent page responded with the copy "I KNOW." The particular ad implied that refrigerators of the future would automatically sense milk's expiration date. Even though "Intelligence Everywhere" received little praise from the advertising community, critics cited the campaign as a turning point for Motorola. In early 2002 Tim Parsey's line of Motorola phones were ready for market. Motorola needed a campaign that not only matched the stylish look of Parsey's phones but also updated the corporation's antiquated image.

TARGET MARKET

The "Moto" campaign initially targeted trendsetters in their mid-20s who, as the creatives at Ogilvy & Mather explained, were always searching for the best phone. The ad agency hoped that if the initial spots resonated with such trendsetters, the perception of Motorola as a young, hip brand would spread into other demographics. Before they were available to the public, new Motorola phones were given to celebrities such as British actress Helen Mirren and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. The new V70 Motorola phone was also released when the "Moto" campaign began. Ogilvy & Mather assumed that the $400-$500 price tag for the V70 would deter younger mobile-phone users. After V70 sales tripled Motorola's original expectations, the campaign's target expanded to include younger consumers, businesspeople, and even the young sales associates in phone retail outlets.

"Until last year [2002], Motorola had no brand image," Chris Ambrosio, an analyst for the telecommunications research firm Strategy Analytics, explained to Brandweek. "It was a mom's handset or a dad's handset. In 2002, they corrected that. They solidified their core offerings and 'Moto' really took off in the U.S.," Ambrosio concluded. The campaign targeted younger consumers by airing commercials with popular electronic music artists, such as Paul Van Dyke and Felix da Housecat. Commercials ran across networks popular among youths, such as MTV. Promotional material was given to the young sales associates working in phone retail stores. Expanding the campaign's target proved effective. The consultancy company Gartner Group noted in 2003 that, within retail outlets, Motorola phones were two of the top three most recommended handsets.

COMPETITION

Motorola's two major competitors were Nokia, a company based in Finland, and Samsung, a South Korean mobile-phone company. In 2001 Nokia's market share was 30 percent—twice that of Motorola. Nokia was known for its stylish and user-friendly phones, and it relied on straightforward ad campaigns with the tagline "Connecting People," which it had used since 1993. In an interview with Ad Age Global, Caroline Carter, president of Grey Worldwide EMEA, one of Nokia's ad agencies, explained, "[Nokia has] a clear view that it's not about the technology, it's about what the technology does for people."

Samsung Electronics North America, the North American branch of the South Korean company Samsung Group, spent $200 million on marketing its product range with a global campaign titled "DigitAll Experience." In 2002 Samsung was the world's third-largest mobile-phone manufacturer, behind Nokia and Motorola. "DigitAll Experience" used Internet ads, print ads, and television spots to promote Samsung products that included personal digital assistants (PDAs), flat-screen computer monitors, plasma-screen televisions, DVD players, and even Samsung's Homepad Internet Refrigerator. The latter featured an embedded computer that recorded and displayed digital photos, browsed the Internet, and even captured digital video.

Marketing executives at Samsung hoped that, by promoting all of the premium products at once, Samsung's entire brand would be bolstered. "If you see ads for our DVDs [players], [the ads] will help us sell refrigerators, and the refrigerator ads will help us sell other product. We want to reach anyone who has ever purchased a Samsung product before," Peter Weedfald, vice president of North America strategic marketing and new media at Samsung, said to the Delaney Report. The campaign was developed by the ad agencies Foote Cone & Belding and Chiel Communications America.

Print ads displayed sleek product images with the tagline "DigitAll" and Samsung's logo. Television spots showed consumers enjoying a wide range of Samsung brand electronics. Internet advertising consumed the brunt of the campaign's resources. In early 2002 the price per Internet ad impression—also known as the single display of an Internet ad—was estimated at $2.50, a historical low for online advertising. Samsung took advantage of the bargain prices and released ads across 57 of the Internet's most popular websites, including Forbes.com, Yahoo.com, Fortune.com, BusinessWeek.com, and CRN.com. Several online ads included a sweepstakes offering a $5,000 shopping spree at Sears, which was also one of Samsung's retailers.

MARKETING STRATEGY

Creatives at the Taiwan office of Ogilvy & Mather first took notice of Taiwanese youth, who were unversed in the English r and l syllables, referring to their Motorola phones as "Moto." The agency's New York office liked the abbreviation so much that it constructed Motorola's estimated $100 million campaign around it. The campaign first surfaced in January 2002, when Ogilvy & Mather hired a graffiti artist to leave keyhole-shaped designs on the pavement within Hong Kong's trendy Lan Kwai Fong nightspot area. The shapes resembled Motorola's new V70 phone. TV commercials aired across Asia during the same month. In March print ads and television spots were released in North America and Europe. The campaign's lead spot, "Hello Moto," was backed by electronic music and copy that conjoined the word "MOTO" with words that reflected Motorola's new image. In the spot businessmen were shown talking on phones, and the word "MEETINGMOTO" appeared. The phrase "MOTOHIP/MOTOHOP" was then juxtaposed over an image of a club scene; and the spot ended with a male voice-over stating, "Hello Moto." The phrase referred to the website www.HelloMoto.com, which provided Motorola phones and accessories.

GEOFFREY FROST

In 1999 Geoffrey Frost left his position as global director of advertising at Nike to help the electronics company Motorola improve its archaic image. Frost soon hired a former design chief of Apple Computer, Tim Parsey, to design a new line of Motorola phones. Many considered Frost to be the mastermind of Motorola's rebound during the successful 2002 "Moto" campaign. Just after his promotion to executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Motorola, Frost died of natural causes on November 17, 2005. Although he remained elusive about his actual age in interviews, it was later reported he was 55 years old at the time of death. Remembered for his booming laugh and love for pop culture, Frost told Advertising Age just before he died, "I'm 17 forever."

The campaign's print ads featured varying "Moto-isms" superimposed over images of individuals that represented the "Moto-isms." "GIZMOMOTO," "ALPHAMOTO," "BANGIN'MOTO," "BANGBANGMOTO," and more than 80 other words were created for the ads. One of the most commented-upon print ads, "DIVAMOTO," featured a beautiful 20-something woman wearing a black feather stole and holding a Motorola clamshell phone. "We're trying to create a new culture around our products," Jacquie Amacher, director of brand communication for Motorola North America, said to the Chicago Sun-Times.

During the campaign's initial weeks, advertising critics considered the strategy a gamble because it excluded information about the phones' features. Instead the ads relied entirely on stylish and fashion-conscious content to attract customers. Ad critic Lewis Lazare of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, "This startlingly different ad campaign could backfire badly if Motorola doesn't prove at heart to be the kind of company the advertising so dramatically suggests it is in the process of becoming."

As the campaign proved to resonate not only with 25-year-old trendsetters but also with the youth culture, Motorola extended the campaign's life span past its initial November 2002 completion date. The campaign's target was also expanded to include a younger crowd. During the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, three television spots featured different electronic-music artists and the new mixable ring tones (which allowed users to assign different sounds to specific callers) for the Motorola C350 phone. One spot began with DJ Felix da Housecat, who received a phone call inside a bar. DJ Felix began humming the phone's catchy ring tone, which was later hummed by everyone who came in contact with the jingle. The spot ended with the previous campaign's tagline, "Intelligence Everywhere," followed by a voice-over saying "Hello Moto." Another spot featured cars that started bouncing up and down after a phone rang with a song by DJ Colette. The third spot depicted city lights pulsing to the beat of a ring tone created by DJ Paul Van Dyke. The campaign ended in 2005.

OUTCOME

Advertising analysts attributed the revitalization of the Motorola brand largely to the "Moto" campaign, along with Tim Parsey's new design for Motorola. But strong advertising and sleek design were not the only contributors. In order to improve sales and distribution, Motorola had also strengthened relationships with carriers such as the Sprint PCS Group. Matt Baker, Motorola's senior director of North American marketing, explained to Brandweek, "We started to leverage relationships we hadn't in the past. There was growth in the Verizon business and deeper conversations with the Best Buys and Circuit Citys of the world."

Motorola outperformed Nokia in sales for the first time in four years during the fourth quarter of 2002. For 2003 Motorola posted its first annual sales increase in three years. Two years later Motorola's global market share was estimated at 16.8 percent, a substantial improvement from the company's 11 percent in 2000. Adweek Magazine's Technology Marketing gave Ogilvy & Mather its 2003 Ad Agency of the Year award for creating the "Moto" campaign and other high-profile campaigns, such as IBM's "Gizmo." The head of Motorola's global marketing, Geoffrey Frost, was named one of Brandweek magazine's Marketers of the Year in 2005. The October 10 Brandweek article praised Frost by stating, "Once known for unfashionable phones and clunky advertising, Motorola now has probably the hottest phone on the market [RAZR], a deal with Apple's iTunes, and a hipper image thanks to its catchy 'Moto' ads."