Company: Godfrey Q and Partners, LLC
Company Description: Godfrey Q is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with operations in London and Singapore. Founded in 2003, the agency is wholly owned by its founders Patrick Godfrey and Dennis O’Rourke as well as its partners. Godfrey Q finished 2014 with 78 employees worldwide. Primarily (but not exclusively) a B2B agency, the shop’s top three clients in 2014 were Symantec, Brocade and Splunk.
Nomination Category: Marketing Campaign Categories - Specialty
Nomination Sub Category: Brand Experience of the Year - Business-to-Business

Nomination Title: Symantec's The Backup Of Destiny Campaign

Tell the story of this nominated brand experience program for the judges (up to 650 words). Describe the genesis, planning, execution, and results to date of your campaign.

System Administrators are tragically underappreciated. Though vital to a thriving business, most people only notice them when something goes wrong. Good backup procedures are essentially invisible, and good System Admins can feel that way themselves. But Symantec recognizes these men and women for the unsung heroes they are – the diligent protectors of a business’s ability to succeed. And so Symantec tasked us with creating a social experience in support of Backup Exec 2014 that spoke to the true experiences of System Admins.

Complicating this was the admins’ own famous mistrust of traditional advertising and their reticence to upgrade from a product they felt was still serviceable to their needs. Regarding the first, traditional advertising had always felt “top down,” and rarely approached admins’ experiences from a level that felt real or even respectful. And of the second complication, backup has always been a field that rewarded a certain careful conservatism. As a result, above 90% of the existing install base had failed to upgrade, despite new breakthrough technologies that would save them untold hours of work.

When presented with the challenge of creating a compelling experience for an audience inured to insincere marketing, we had the idea of translating the classic choose your own adventure narrative style into a YouTube experience. It allowed us a not-too-serious way to create a humorous story that addressed our audience with that rarest quality: sincerity. And why stop there when we could add a bombastic summer blockbuster-style trailer and a living Twitter account for the protagonist?

The result was a close collaboration of creative, technical, production and media teams working to integrate quirky humor with the social and technological systems used by our audience. By collaborating with specialists at Google, we overcame technological limitations within YouTube and delivered unique experiences to mobile and desktop clients. The production team worked closely with a technical advisory team to produce environmental visual effects that pulled double duty communicating both product and narrative. The social and creative teams created a Twitter account for Dave, our protagonist, and supplied design and character guidelines that turned it from a charming nonessential into a self-perpetuating social asset.

The results of the campaign were especially gratifying: Within a matter of weeks, we had generated 29 million impressions and over 728,000 views. The total time spent playing was more than 435 days; that’s excess of 10,000 man-hours of engagement among an audience openly suspicious of inauthentic advertising. Our click-to-download rate was a very encouraging 3.56%, and a mean view time 135%the industry average.

“The Backup of Destiny” is the result of many minds moving in concert. It’s more than a video; it’s an experience that invites a famously truculent audience to involve themselves with the narrative. It’s a carefully wrought campaign that integrates various disciplines to create a cohesive, compelling experience. And, most importantly, it’s an exciting and repeatable approach that drove overwhelmingly positive business results.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief features and results of the nominated campaign (up to 150 words).

-The Backup of Destiny was a uniquely social experience created for Symantec.
- The objective was to drive product brand engagement and renewal traffic for Symantec's Backup Exec product.
-29 million impressions
-728,000 views
-435 days of total play time spent
-3.56% click to download rate