SAP

SAP is a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted them to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience.

And we have some history with them. Truth be told it’s not recent history, but history still worth sharing.

As most of our B2B tech industry readers will already know, SAP’s a software behemoth with almost infinite resources internally and via agency partners. In the days when WPP’s Ogilvy was still the global agency of record (before losing the account to Omnicom’s BBDO and PHD), our team, at the time under our previous agency brand – Foster + Redmond – stood on call for SAP marketing to tackle the handful of things that Ogilvy “couldn’t figure out”.

“Ogilvy’s great at scaling a complex marketing solution out across 50+ countries in 30+ languages. What they’re not always great at, is finding the original solution in the first place. That’s why we want you guys around.”

Anonymous – formerly an SAP Global marketing executive

We’re not patting ourselves on the back too hard here. These weren’t large budgets, and the work wasn’t all that consistent. Why not, you ask? Well they were Ogilvy for God’s sake – very smart people who actually did figure most things out.

A great example of the type of work we pioneered at SAP is what generally became known there as “value calculators”. Consumer and web-friendly interactive translations of insanely complex, multivariate, cost/benefit-oriented algorithms built by the company’s sales engineers.

The whole idea behind these types of experiences was to expose the cost/benefit math behind the solutions (in a consumable way on SAP.com) to potentially qualified enterprise buyers and influencers, and move those individuals into the top of the sales funnel as qualified leads that could then be further campaigned, lead-scored, and ultimately personally engaged by enterprise sales reps.

Sounds simple. Actually complex when trying to implement something that would support 5+ major enterprise software solutions, across (at the time) 26 distinct industries ranging from automotive, to retail, to mining.

We always appreciated the types of challenges our principal client, now unsurprisingly the Chief Marketing Officer of another very presigious global software firm, would throw at us. It was difficult, strenuous work, but our team excelled at it and produced great solutions – most of which saw the commercial light of day – before being shunted over to Ogilvy for local syndication in those 50+ countries. Alas, we didn’t earn any residuals for that scale-out work. But the reward was knowing that our ideas and execution were that solid.

We were also rewarded with a rising reputation inside SAP. So we got to work on strategic projects like the global launch of NetWeaver (also referred to as WebAS) – a software platform that allows businesses to integrate data, processes, and other elements from various sources into a unified SAP environment. It’s actually the runtime environment for SAP applications and all of the mySAP Business Suite. In other words, it’s the foundation of the SAP technology stack used by SAP developers, administrators, and consultants around the world.

We earned some other less complex opportunities, too. Like participating with SAP Global Marketing in the planning and execution of what became the testimonially-based “Understand, Anticipate, Inspire” launch campaign for SAP’s Retail Industry Business Unit.

We always felt like these less intense assignments were intended as soft holidays, assigned to us for rest and recovery in between the more challenging projects. They were definitely welcome respites.

Over time, our many projects with SAP would materialize instantly, out of nowhere, operate either wildly or calmly in sprints ranging anywhere from 4 to 24 weeks, and then vanish just as quickly as they’d appeared.

Our principal client actually used to intro our new assignments to us with the phrase, “I’m afraid I have another booty call for you guys”. Sort of like that moment in the first scene of every Mission: Impossible you’ve ever watched, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”