SAP Marketing has had a rough patch. There was the obnoxious “spokesperson”, Phil that SAP had to hastily take down. There was the balloon imagery around SAP’s cloud. Someone forgot to think about the hot air connotations. There’s all the New Age “does your business have a soul?” ads that had people scratching their heads. More recently there was a 8 page color insert in the WSJ with language so banal, I was surprised the Journal even ran it.
But they have a big win with Kevin Plank, Founder and CEO of Under Armour. The backdrop of the NBA and the Stanley Cup Finals and the mini-controversy around Stephen Curry’s new sneakers certainly help. The imagery and the music are uplifting, but Kevin himself is a marketing stud and even SAP could not screw that up.
Two nits. All the sensors and displays are gleaming precise metrics so I wish Kevin’s script had given him a specific supply chain improvement metric – not “20, 30 to 40%”.
And the final SAP tag line “When you run Live, you run Simple”
What does that mean?
Face it - Any software which is not live, in production, is shelfware. In SAP Nation, if you are not Live, it could be a sign of another massive writeoff.
As for Simple, I much prefer what Kevin calls it “a big, bad technology partner”. Accept that as a compliment SAP, quit the “Simple” BS.
