As we thank our tipsters, let’s chalk one up for Jeff Goodby and the gang as we’ve received confirmation that San Francisco’s GS&P has picked up the global advertising business for tech giant, Cisco, which previously worked with Ogilvy. We’ve obtained an internal memo sent from Cisco CMO Blair Christie to staff earlier this afternoon, which you can read verbatim below and after the jump. GS&P itself deferred to client for further comment.
“Team,
We continue to evolve the Cisco Story to ensure our relevance and differentiation in the marketplace. As part of this important “One Voice” effort, we have made a strategic decision to award our global advertising business to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GSP). Based in San Francisco, California, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners is part of the Omnicom Group, Inc., an advertising holding company whose agency networks include BBDO, DDB Worldwide and TBWA Worldwide.
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Founded in 1983, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners is a full-service advertising agency, specializing in creative digital, print, broadcast and integrated media planning. They have produced award-winning advertising for a host of global brands, including Hewlett Packard, General Electric, Google, ebay, Comcast, Yahoo! and Netflix. Some of their notable campaigns are, Got Milk?, Comcast’s The Slowskys, Budweizer Lizards, and Foster Farms’ Chickens. If you’d like to learn more about GSP, please visit their website: http://www.goodbysilverstein.com/
Cisco is one of the top 15 brands globally, and we are excited to work with this dynamic strategic marketing and creative partner. During the accelerated agency review, GSP demonstrated their innovative thinking about what our Cisco Story could be and how it could be powerfully expressed through a creative and integrated campaign – an approach that further aligns our CXO and Customer Care About efforts under one umbrella positioning message. GSP provided compelling insights about our target audience and articulated a future vision – and Cisco’s role in it – in an inspiring and compelling way. GSP focused a great deal of their pitch on digital innovation, including social and mobile, something that is critically important to Cisco as we continue to build on our One Voice approach set forth in FY12.
I look forward to introducing GSP to you and to our ecosystem of agency partners as we work together to deliver a compelling and unified Cisco Story. Our goal is to unveil the new Cisco Story in FY13. I will be meeting with many of you in the coming weeks to share the new positioning.
I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to our outgoing agency Ogilvy & Mather who has been our agency-of-record since early 2002. The Ogilvy team was instrumental in helping us reposition the Cisco brand to appeal to a broader audience and connect deeper with our customers. Ogilvy has been a trusted business partner, and we wish them the very best.
I also want to thank our internal GMCC team who made themselves available at short notice to brief the agency candidates as they prepared their pitches. Your input was critical in ensuring a successful articulation of the Cisco Story.
Awarding our advertising business to a new agency is a significant milestone for Cisco and for GMCC. You can see how we’re communicating our decision externally here:
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/tomorrow-isnt-what-it-used-to-beI believe the work you will see in the coming months will position Cisco strongly for the future and effectively showcase our thought leadership.
Best,
Blair”