IBM Promotes the i5 on Prime-Time Television

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you were surfing through the channels watching television on the local ABC station last night and stopped to watch a movie called "The Five People You Meet in Heaven," you might have been surprised to see something that many iSeries enthusiasts have been wanting to see: Television advertisements promoting the iSeries platform, and specifically, the new eServer i5.

I happened to catch about 20 minutes of that show on Sunday night while waiting for the news to start, but didn't see the advertisement. According to IBM, it featured the Power5-based eServer i5 as a server consolidation platform. Someone who saw the ad and emailed to me said it was about Linux, but I have not verified it for myself yet. According to an IBM press release, this "humorous" ad was the one that Big Blue tested earlier in the year in Kansas City and St. Louis.

If you missed that iSeries ad, here is the iSeries ad schedule according to one source who says he knows when IBM is running the ads. All of the ads are running on ABC in a nationwide promotion campaign. In addition to running in "The Five People You Meet in Heaven," which was the Sunday night ABC movie, IBM has booked ads in two episodes of "Lost," a drama show (as distinct from so-called reality shows) about 48 people who survive a jet plane crash on a remote Pacific island. The iSeries ads will run on December 15 between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., and a week later on December 22 between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. IBM has also bought an iSeries ad during "Remember the Titans," which will be the Saturday prime-time movie on December 18 on ABC; this movie looks at the racial issues as a real Alexandria, Virginia public school becomes desegregated in 1971 and gets its first African-American football coach and its first racially integrated football team. IBM has also apparently booked two ads in "Boston Legal," a quirky, black humor drama about a Boston law office that stars William Shatner and James Spader, among others.

"It's simply time again to unleash IBM's best kept secret on the world," Peter Bingaman, vice president of marketing for the iSeries, said in announcing the TV ad campaign in a press release late Friday evening. "I am excited about this campaign as it is further affirmation to our customers and partners that we are completely committed to the iSeries brand. It's an exciting and very strategic IBM server platform that we are again bringing front and center to prime time business."

The TV ad campaign will come as a bit of a surprise to many people. At the Fall COMMON midrange trade show only two months ago, Cecelia Marrese, who was in charge of iSeries marketing before Bingaman took the job on November 1, said that IBM ran the TV ads in St. Louis and Kansas City and set up control groups in Columbus, Ohio, and a number of other cities, running a series of print ads, drive-time radio slots, and TV ads to promote the iSeries. What she said did not make it seem like IBM would be running TV ads any time soon, but there is a new marketing VP in town now who apparently has other ideas. Marrese said that no one who was polled by IBM in either the Missouri cities or the control group cities remembered the TV spots. But she said that the combination of radio and print ads, which featured local companies talking about their iSeries. Perhaps as significantly, she said further that, rather than trying to compete directly against the large amount of marketing for Windows, Linux, and Unix solutions at a platform level, IBM would probably try to tailor future iSeries ads at specific industries and geographies where iSeries solutions can--and do--compete against solutions on these other platforms.

Clearly, Bingaman and his boss, Mike Borman, the new general manager of the iSeries Division, have other ideas about what IBM should do and what those test runs in Kansas City and St. Louis mean. The question now is if these six slots are the beginning of a sustained commitment to market the iSeries, or just a broader test of the idea of running TV ads to promote the platform. We shall see.

The ad aired on TV last night is the same one that was shown to COMMON attendees at the recent show in Toronto. The Toronto User's Group has a copy of the ad posted on their Web site at www.tug.ca/i5_commercial_4-27.mpg.