(Note: After an award-winning career in the media business covering the tech industry, Bob Evans was VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle from 2012 to 2016. He now runs his own firm, Evans Strategic Communications LLC.)
CLOUD WARS -- Jumping into the often zany and occasionally Zen-y mosh-pit of television advertising, cloud heavyweights IBM and Amazon have begun showcasing their cloud-computing expertise and philosophies with campaigns that are strikingly different in messaging, tone and purpose.
And in so doing, the two enterprise-cloud powerhouses open up a new front in the Cloud Wars.
As both IBM an Amazon look to fully exploit the surge in C-level acceptance of and appetite for the cloud, their TV ads reveal a great deal about the target audiences for the pitches as well as about their creators, each of which has posted about $15.8 billion in trailing 12-month cloud-computing revenue.
For IBM, its 60-second IBM Cloud For Enterprise powerfully underscores the company's positioning if its cloud as a vital piece of—but not the central component of—IBM's high-level strategy.
What's particularly intriguing about this advertising face-off is that while most members of the media have for some reason chosen to crown Amazon the unquestioned leader of the cloud, the reality is that in the middle of this year, IBM was actually beating Amazon in annual cloud revenue, $15.1 billion to $14.5 billion.
For the past year, IBM has been aggressively and consistently positioning itself as offering a "cloud-plus" approach: cloud plus cognitive, cloud plus AI, cloud plus Watson, cloud plus data, cloud plus security. And its high-intensity TV ads underscore that positioning clearly and engagingly.
Conversely, the ads from Amazon's Web Services unit take a grass-roots angle centered on DIY developers, programmers and architects who "roll up their sleeves" and "break down barriers" with the help of the AWS cloud.
I have to say I was surprised to see that Amazon didn't use the ads to at least hint at an extension beyond the its past and present capabilities: infrastructure and platform software. Instead, the ads—while lively and eye-catching—seem to only reinforce the gritty behind-the-scenes deep-tech services that have made Amazon such a huge success in the enterprise cloud.
If part of the purpose of a first-ever ad campaign is to fire the imaginations of tens of millions of people who don't know much about the company, then the AWS ads offered an impression of deep-tech iconoclasts who, according to the ad, "don't freak out when they run into a problem." (Although I swear the guy shown in that portion of the ad is clearly freaking out.)
But with its giant re-Invent conference kicking off today in Las Vegas, perhaps Amazon decided to use the ad campaign to fire up the true believers in the here and now rather than attempting to hint at future extensions into new realms such as SaaS applications and the rapidly emerging world of digital business.
That's the exact opposite of what IBM's ads deliver: an unmistakable message that the IBM Cloud is all about business and innovation and the power of data, AI, business processes integrated end-to-end, blockchain, and the power of innovation.
Here's a look at a few of the voiceover excerpts from each company's ads. First from IBM:
- "This is a diamond trapped on a blockchain protected against fraud, theft and trafficking."
- "This is a financial transaction secure from hacks and threats others can't see."
- "This is a patient's medical history made secure while still available to their doctor, at their fingertips."
- "This is an asteroid live-streamed to millions of viewers from 220 miles above Earth."
- "This is AI trained by experts in 20 industries—your"
- "This is not the cloud you know: This is the IBM Cloud: built for your business, designed for your data, secure to the core."
- "The IBM Cloud is the cloud for enterprise. Yours."
Even the background song—Harry Nilson's 1971 classic Jump Into The Fire—reinforces the messages the IBM ads are hammering home: it's a whole new day in the world of business and technology.
And now from the Amazon campaign:
- "Meet the new builder, in the new age of rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty."
- "They're in labs, lofts, and war-rooms, launching scrappy startups and reinventing big business."
- "They see what doesn't exist, and make it exist."
- "They know that the freedom to fail is the freedom to build."
- "These are the New Builders—and we're the cloud that's obsessed with turning their dreams into realities."
- " Because we believe everything gets better when you let nothing stand in the builders' way."
- "Amazon Web Services: Build On!"
Of course, it's impossible to know how much of an impact—if any—television ads will have on the success of the AWS Cloud or the IBM Cloud. But it's fascinating to contemplate the thinking that went into the messages that these new ads deliver to a world that's totally unaccustomed to hearing about a still relatively arcane technology epitomized by the wonky terms of IaaS and PaaS and SaaS.
What message did each company want to trigger in the minds of the public about the cloud and its ability to help drive the adoption and acceleration of digital business?
To me, IBM's ad promised that it can help business leaders not only make sense of an rapidly changing business landscape but also master it.
For Amazon, the message that came through to me was that it stands for the technical experts that write the code and map out the architecture that sit under the applications and the business processes that power increasingly larger chunks of the global economy.
While both Amazon and IBM are likely to reach or get very close to $20 billion in annual cloud revenue within the coming year, we're still in the very early days of the enterprise cloud.
So the positions these two cloud powerhouses are staking out with these new TV ads will surely evolve—but for now, Amazon is casting itself as the infrastructure king, while IBM is staking out the more-sweeping role of digital-business expert.
And it will surely be fun to see how these strategic-positioning battles play out in the Cloud Wars.
