Eliot Spitzer Could Haved Screwed My Marketing Campaign

The book at the right reads "Great e-mails I have read" by Eliot Spitzer.  This image was used in advertising we created while I was marketing director at Iron Mountain for an e-discovery services marketing campaign.  At the time Eliot Spitzer was the Attorney General of New York and he was making a name for himself by prosecuting Wall Street firms very publicly.

When we ran this print ad in the Wall Street Journal and several financial IT publications with a banner ad with the same creative on their websites, it was in 2004-5.  A call-to-action in print at the bottom of the print ad and as a click-through with the banner ads sent prospects to a landing page that collected some contact information in exchange for a white paper on e-discovery.

The ad won a few awards, but more importantly to our business, the advertising campaign achieved a 900% gain in unique visitors to the web site along with a significant number of leads for sales.  It also got us awareness and some PR from no less than the NY Times which said "The ad, for the data management services of  Iron Mountain, Inc., says that "the time to manage your e-mail isn't when the attorney general is asking you to produce it." Mr. Spitzer joked that it was too late for most of Wall Street to manage its messages "because we already have them."

Eliot Spitzer loved the ad!

His office actually called us up once and asked for a copy.  We sent him a framed version and when his office called us back to thank us, they told us that Eliot Spitzer put it up on his office wall.  As a promo, we also had blank books made that looked just like the red book in the ad and we used them at customer events where we ran out of the books every time.  We heard back from an attendee at one financial conference that Eliot Spitzer held one of our books up over his head during a speaking engagement because he was so proud of it.

As marketers, we always want go get as much measurement of the results of our efforts as we can.  It supports the business, helps us justify future programs and - when we get good results - it justs feels good to have a success on our hands.  Knowing that Eliot Spitzer liked it was good stuff too. 

We were lucky

As I watch the news today, I am amazed to see the free fall that Eliot Spitzer is in.  While he was certainly never a paid celebrity for the ad we created a few years back, we did certainly bet our ad campaign on his celebrity.  I'll leave commenting to Eliot Spitzer's behavior to the many others out there online and offline - especially the late night comedians.  Lucky for us, Spitzer didn't get busted in the middle of our ad campaign.

Comments

[David Meerman Scott]

Interesting campaign you did for Iron Mountain. And so timely today!

David