MarketingSherpa Video Archive

How to Leverage the Zombie Apocalypse for an Award-winning Multichannel Campaign

Daniel Burstein, MECLABS, and Christine Nurnberger, SunGard Availability Services



In this recent MarketingSherpa webinar, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, sat down with Christine Nurnberger, Vice President of Marketing, SunGard Availability Services, and discussed the story behind SunGard's award-winning campaign that brought zombies to the B2B sphere.

The efforts of the team at SunGard locked in their win for MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014, presented by ExactTarget, in the Connect & Integrate — Lead Gen category.

Watch this video replay of the entire webinar to learn how Nurnberger and her team incorporated email marketing, direct mail and social media all coinciding with the release of the zombie-themed movie "World War Z" to achieve a 1.2% higher click-to-open rate among the director level, a 3% increase in CTO among president and owner titles and a 2% reactivation of inactive contacts.

Here is some feedback from the live audience of this webinar:
It highlighted a brilliant, creative campaign. Lots of fun and good marketing process detail. — Dominic

Christine did an exceptional job. I just wish I could pick her brain one-on-one (no pun intended). Honestly, [I wish] I could just make the sessions mandatory to attend for the rest of my company. — Matt

Solid, but brief, overview covered a highly focused campaign from beginning to end (good diagrams), and related marketing to revenue. — Patricia

I liked how the marketing test was broken down and explanation of the segments. — Marsha

See Christine Nurnberger's presentation "Above the Noise: How an IT company leveraged unique creative and an integrated approach to 'wake the dead' and connect with its audience" at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 for a limited time.

Download the slides to this presentation

Related Resources

MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014, presented by ExactTarget

Multichannel Marketing: IT company's zombie-themed campaign increases CTO 3% at president, owner level

Multichannel Campaigns: How do you avoid zombie marketing?

Email Marketing: 3 award-winning lessons about relevance

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Video Transcription

Burstein: Hello, and thanks for joining us again for another MarketingSherpa webinar. Today, we've got a really fun case study for you about how a B2B IT company got into zombie marketing with their multichannel marketing campaigns. We'll tell you what that means in just a moment.

But I wanted to remind you that you can follow along on #SherpaWebinar. Ask your questions. What do you want to know? Also, share what works for you in multichannel marketing, lead gen, B2B, email. And you can ask those questions to a high-performing marketer in every single MarketingSherpa webinar. We bring in a marketer just like you. One of your peers. Not some thought leader. Someone who is down in the trenches doing these case studies themselves.

And the impressive marketer we have today is Christine Nurnberger, the vice president of marketing for SunGard Availability Services. Thanks for joining us today, Christine.

Nurnberger: No problem. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Burstein: Absolutely. So I'm in our studios in Jacksonville, Fla. Christine is joining us from Amesbury, Mass., where Christine, the weather is just socking you in today, huh?

Nurnberger: Yes. We are trapped at home. Lots of snow. Roads are pretty bad. And I'm just feeling pretty lucky that I have my power at this point, Dan.

Burstein: Well, hopefully that power lasts at least for the next half-hour. So Christine is a well-regarded marketer, and this campaign, actually, is a winner in MarketingSherpa Email Awards. Not just the MarketingSherpa Email Awards. I know also Marketo Revvie, the Gold Stevie award and I think in B2B Magazine, it's also one of the best B2B campaigns. So we're really glad to have Christine here today.

So as you follow along, we'll also have a lot more content we're sharing through #SherpaWebinar. There is the full written case study with Christine about this effort, and some more content that you will probably find helpful. So again, tune in to #SherpaWebinar.

But with that, let's just dive into it. Christine, can you give us an idea of the services that SunGard provides and the challenge that you were faced when you came on?

Nurnberger: Sure. SunGard has actually been around for 30 years. We were born out of the oil and gas industry, and originally focused on disaster recovery services. Our business has evolved. As business relies on IT all the time now, any downtime, any issues around recovery, they're simply not acceptable anymore.

So today, SunGard Availability Services focused on advanced recovery services, but also managed hosting production and cloud services. Basically helping sure that businesses can keep their IT always on all the time, so that there's no impact to revenue or business in the event of an outage of any type.

When I joined SunGard two years ago, I think it was a very typical situation, where there was a lot of friction between sales and marketing. Marketing was working really hard, doing a great job. They were goaled with generating 6,000 quote-unquote "leads." And sales was extremely frustrated, because the leads were not really ready to be called by a sales rep. They were more like a warm contact than a lead that was truly ready to move into a buy cycle. So the marketing team, while they worked really, really hard, just wasn't seeing that impact on pipeline or revenue that we need to see as B2B marketers, because the goals between sales and marketing were really misaligned.

Burstein: Yeah. So it sounds like you were faced with this classic question: what is a lead, right? You had to deliver 6,000 leads, but what did you really have to deliver?

Nurnberger: Well, that's exactly it. So the first thing that I did when I joined SunGard is sort of re-establish the terminology and service follow up agreements between marketing and sales. So I signed up for a quota, a contributions pipeline, and a contribution to revenue, both in terms of the number of leads and in terms of the dollar value. And what we established was a process whereby I agreed that when we pass you off a lead, Mr. Sales VP, it's going to be qualified for budget, authority, need and timeline. On your side, Mr. Sales VP, you can accept that lead, you can reject that lead and give us a reason why, you can put it into a nurture stream. But when you accept that lead, it's going to go right into the pipeline, because that's the hand-off.

And with that mutual accountability, we're putting our neck out on the line as marketers that this is what we're going to do, and if we're not doing our job, you need to call us on it by rejecting leads. And we monitor that accept and reject rate very closely. But what it also does is then holds them accountable. They're accepting the leads. They are the ones saying, "Yes, this is pipeline-ready." And they add it to the pipeline with a dollar value.

So it's really done a nice job to tighten off the hand-off between Sales and Marketing and improve our closed-loop reporting.

Burstein: As part of that closed-loop reporting, as we talked about before the call, you get a pretty in-depth look at the results, not just your traditional marketing lead numbers, but actually through the entire funnel.

So we have our first question here from Ambreen, website and social media manager: "How do you measure impact for a niche audience?" So as we look at the results of the specific campaign we're going to talk about today, why don't you give us a little bit of insight into who the audience was for the campaign and how you were measuring the impact of your efforts.

Nurnberger: Sure. There were really, I would say, four separate audiences for the campaign, and the tactics and the vehicles were separated by those four audiences.

So the first audience was a more broad-based email campaign. There was some segmentation to determine whether the audience is a closer fit for our cloud services or our recovery services. There was definitely some segmentation to make sure we were talking to the right folks about the right topic. That was the broad-based campaign into our tubs database.

The second was a specific campaign retargeting contacts who had been inactive with us for a certain period of time. So if a contact had, let's say, not responded or interacted with one of our campaigns within the last six months, we had a very specific email campaign offer go out to those contacts to try and reinvigorate those accounts and get them back integrated with our marketing activities.

The third audience was a very targeted C-level direct mail program. These were, you know, very specific targets, selected hand in hand with sales. Accounts that we were either dying to get our foot into for preliminary discussion, or accounts that are ... that were pretty late in the sales cycle, and we needed an excuse to kind of get back in front of them before the end of the quarter to help push that deal over the line.

And then the fourth audience — and they received the same direct mail tactic — was really the analysts and public relations community. So SunGard, prior to my arrival, had been pretty dark from a public relations perspective. They just sort of slid backwards for about 14 months. And as a result, we really had to do something creative to introduce ourselves to our key media constituents and get on their radar again. And that was the fourth pillar of the campaign.

With regards to measuring impact in a niche audience, we ... obviously we look at all of the standard campaign KPIs. Your open rate, your click to open rate, your response rate within certain segments. Are you seeing a better response at the C-level, the director level. Are you seeing a certain response or pickup by vertical. We set out, with every campaign, with a set of metrics that we hope to achieve based on the nature of one of those four pillars, as an example, and then we measure against that.

The ultimate, though, measure of revenue for my team at SunGard Availability Services is revenue ... pipeline and revenue contribution. So as I mentioned, at the beginning of the year, we literally assign ourselves a pipeline contribution quota and a revenue contribution quota by product line and align it with sales revenue objectives, and we report on that just like a sales VP would.

So within, you know, my level marketing realm, we're looking at all of these metrics, like the increased and two open rate a month, president or owner titles. This stuff is all great. It's all leading indicators for us, and it is proved to me that we are or are not moving the needle within our intended niche. But ultimately, it's back to pipeline and revenue contribution.

Burstein: And we're going to talk about those four audiences you mentioned in just a moment. But first, let's get to that creativity you mentioned, as well. Steve, he's a chief executive officer. He wants to know, when did you launch this campaign? And so can you get into a little bit about when you launched this campaign, and also really the idea for the creativity behind it?

Nurnberger: Sure. Well, we had originally planned to do a zombie-oriented campaign in October 2012. As we looked at, you know, our business as a whole ... you know, let's be honest. Disaster recovery, managed production services, IT outsourcing, it's not exactly the sexiest technology in the world. And so when I was hired by the CEO, he basically gave me the challenge, "What can you do to break through the noise?" And by tying our real, true business value proposition as keeping businesses always on, always available, always running to something like a zombie apocalypse, there's kind of a natural synergy there.

Unfortunately, best laid plans kind of went by the wayside, because that was when Hurricane Sandy hit. And everybody in our business was focused on making sure that our customers, our employees, our customers families were safe, and that we were servicing our customers to get their businesses up and running as quickly as possible. And when we say business, yes, we serve enterprises, but we serve hospitals, we serve banks, we serve nursing facilities. These companies cannot afford to be down. They have to be up and running for their communities.

So Hurricane Sandy kind of pushed the original zombie plan to the wayside. Then in March, we heard that Brad Pitt was going to be producing a movie based on Max Brooks' book "World War Z." And reading through it, we thought, oh my gosh, this could be our second chance here to revitalize the zombie theme. It's very popular. "Walking Dead" was still very, very hot. And so we timed the launch of the "World War Z" campaign with the launch of the movie, which I believe was early summer.

Burstein: So one thing that was really impressive about this campaign is ... me and Christine were talking before this call. We both worked in B2B IT for a while. And it tends to be around speeds and feeds, or it tends to be around scalability. It's very hard, in that environment, to really stick out and do something daring. And as we get into this, you'll see, it's not just a clever idea. It's an idea, and a creative idea, that really had legs, and really ties into the value proposition for the company.

But still, to make this happen, one of our biggest questions was how did you gain buy in? And so we actually have a question here from Andrew. He's an email production manager. Building buy-in within the organization with peers and executives. He wants to know how you did that. And it sounds like it came down to the culture of your company.

Nurnberger: I think it does. So SunGard, as I mentioned, has been around for 30 years. We were seen definitely as a technology dinosaur. Starting about three years ago, we had a whole new slew of senior management come in. So as of last January, 70% of the top 150 managers had been with the business for less than a year.

And with that sort of fresh culture coming in, there was definitely the need and desire there to recognize that we need to change our perception. We can't be seen as this dinosaur technology company, when we are actually really doing interesting and innovative things that are on the cutting edge of availability services. We've got to do something that breaks through the noise and reflects that.

And so when I met with this CEO before I took on the position of the broader marketing organization, he said, "Christine, don't be afraid to break a lot of glass." He said, "Clearly what we've been doing, the plays we've been running, it's not working." He said, "I want to see creativity that cuts through all the clutter of business to business technology marketing."

So right away, you know, we had the executive level support. And then we took calculated risks. So we didn't go out and drop, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars at once. We took this piece by piece by testing the message, testing the audience, starting really small with a pilot, and then building on the measurable success. Which, then, of course, the proof is in the pudding. Nobody can push back once you show that it's proven great results.

Burstein: Yeah. So let's take a look into that campaign. So as you mentioned, it's not just a multichannel campaign to an audience. There were four separate audiences. So we have this ... you can see the C-level and the analysts and public relations level at the top. And your email list, you split that actually really into three groups, right? You had two different solutions you segmented it by, and then also your inactive users. Do you want to talk about how you chose those audiences?

Nurnberger: Sure. So we thought that with the zombie theme, we had a great hook into our value proposition. Again, it was creative, it tied to pop culture, but it really does ... it means something to our brand and our promise to our customers. So we wanted to make the most of leveraging that theme, and we wanted to make sure we were covering our bases with regard to the different ways that different folks consume information.

So, as I mentioned earlier, we had sort of the four core groups we were going after. C level executives had a two-part direct mail program, which we'll show you an example of later in the presentation. They were followed up one-on-one by an account executive. The analysts and PR audience had the same two-part direct mail. They were followed up by our PR agency.

And then with regards to the broad-based email, the first asset email dropped to a pretty broad-based audience split between cloud availability and disaster recovery. And then a third email was a third message sent to retargeting inactive users. Part of that email program was they could push to an email landing page where they could enter to win the very, very fancy zombie survival kit that we were sending out. And then the last push on that broader email play was social media, where we went out to our social channels, and the more you liked and shared our content, the higher your chance of winning a zombie survival kit.

And then finally, those were pushed into our CRM system. All of those responders were pushed into our CRM system to be tele-qualified by our marketing team, and hopefully eventually passed onto sales as qualified leads.

Burstein: Excellent. So before we get into the creative samples, we also want to look at not only why you chose those audiences, but why you chose the channels that you did. It's a question we get over and over. "How should I know what channels to invest in? Should I invest in print? Should I invest in email? Direct mail?"

And we've got a question right here from Sherrie. She's a manager of customer experience. How to determine when to email, when to direct mail, etc.

So what we have onscreen looks a little bit complex. But can you give us just a brief overview of how you decide which channels to invest in and how you measure their success?

Nurnberger: I know it looks complex whenever you pop up a visual diagram.

But I would say it's down to three things: testing, testing and testing. And no two businesses are alike. And I know that sounds like a cop-out answer, but it really is what it takes to optimize your program.

So what the diagram is showing here is sort of this yes/no chart based on an action that a prospect takes to engage with us. Or if they don't take action, how they progress into the next cycle of a nurture series. And at every step of the way, with every subject line, we're doing A/B testing. With every banner add, we're doing A/B testing. With every asset, we're doing A/B testing. At each of these points, we're measuring our delivery rates, our open rates, our click to open rates, the unsubscribes.

And so what we built out over 18 months is certainly not what I would consider a silver bullet. But what we do have is our own intelligence about our business, where now we can say, okay, emails dropping to senior executives on Sunday mornings between the hours of 8:00 and 10:00 do much better than any other time during the week. Direct mail works with this audience, but not this audience. For this type of audience, they respond better to something that's ... you know, video campaign, a little bit more pop culture, whereas this audience over here, they really want the technical mumbo-jumbo in white papers.

So there is no easy way to do it except to test, test, test, optimize, optimize, optimize. And again, we were flying blind. When I came into this position two years ago, we had zero metrics. So at some point, you just ... you can't sit there. You've got to just roll the dice and see how it goes. But with the use of marketing automation technology and some best practices around managing handoffs with sales, where we now have a pretty robust level of intelligence that we can apply to all of our future programs.

Burstein: And we're going to take a look at some of you’re a/B tests, because you were kind enough to share them with us. So let's take a look at the emails themselves first. So as you said, you segmented the list. This first one is for your cloud services, and the download was this infographic around the whole zombie theme. And then the second one was for the IT availability solution, and the download was a white paper around the zombie theme.

So something I really want to hit on with these two emails is the creative idea itself. So it's very easy to get a creative idea that catches attention. Like you said, it sticks out from the clutter. But this idea really had legs, and it really exemplified your value proposition. Can you talk a little bit to that, and how you designed these emails and this whole campaign?

Nurnberger: Sure. You know, as we spoke yesterday, Dan, it's one thing to have something that's catchy and creative and tied to pop culture, and that will certainly get people's attention. But for me, again, go back to my ultimate objective, it's pipeline and revenue. And so when we're looking at how can we break through glass in a way that actually really ties back to our value proposition, zombies seemed like a great fit. What better way to test your business continuity plan than to see if it can survive a zombie apocalypse?

You know, I joked two weeks ago ... our company's on Gmail. Gmail went down, and people thought the world was coming to an end.


Imagine if you tried to go to your ATM and withdraw money, and your bank system was down. Or you tried to ... you showed up at the airport and you couldn't board your flight because their computer system was down. These things happen every single day, and they cost businesses millions and millions of dollars.

And so the zombie apocalypse threat, whether it's real or fake, was a really nice tie-in to the main point, which is your business needs to be always on. You can't afford to be down. So you've got to be thinking of, you know, the next acts of nature, floods, fires, but also Tom, Dick or Harry tripping over a cord in your server room and bringing down your customers. And so the zombie apocalypse is really a nice metaphor for that.

And I thought it was a huge win. We're a very conservative company, but we actually got our legal team to agree to let us say that we would back our SLAs in the event of a zombie apocalypse. I thought, it doesn't get much better than that.

Burstein: That's awesome. And if Tom, Dick or Harry are zombies, I'm sure they're much more likely to trip, because zombies don't seem to be too dexterous. They might be knocking things around in data centers.

So you talked about A/B testing. Right now, feel free, GoToWebinar on #SherpaWebinar. We've got Subject Line A, Subject Line B. Let us know which subject line you think won this AB split test. Subject line "Cloud Zombies, Get Expert Help to Ensure Your Survival". Subject line B: "Ensure Your Survival, Integrate a Highly Available Cloud." So feel free to use the GoToWebinar platform, #SherpaWebinar. Let us know which one you think won. We're going to reveal the results in just one moment.

But first, I wanted to mention that MarketingSherpa Email Summit is coming up. It is just around the corner. We're going to have Christine there presenting much more about this case study. You'll also be able to hear other award-winning case studies. It's going to be February 17 through 20 at the Las Vegas Strip's newest hotel, the Aria Resort & Casino. It's going to be beautiful. And it's also your last chance to save. If you purchase your tickets by tomorrow, you'll be able to save $100 on your summit tickets. So that offer expires tomorrow. Grab your tickets today. You can use MarketingSherpa.com/ES2014 to get that discount.

But with that, let's see. We have Imram says A, Marsha says A, Dominique says A, Anne says B, Ron says A. So seems like a lot of people are voting for A. And the winner is? All right, we've got a very savvy audience today.You want to tell us a little bit about, Christine, why you think Subject Line A won? What your hypothesis was there?

Nurnberger: The hypothesis was, you know, again, building off of the hype of "World War Z." Remember, this was just as "World War Z" was hitting theaters, and you literally could not flip on the TV or hit an entertainment web page without that "World War Z" trailer showing up. And that trailer sort of included that helicopter imagery. And so I think the zombies, again, just spurred the open rate to be a little bit higher.

Burstein: So now here's another example A/B split test. The banner is what was tested this time. The banner image, either the zombie or the helicopter. And I will just get right to it and leave less ... and not make you vote this time. But what won and why did it win, Christine?

Nurnberger: I think the guy with the creepy eyes freaked people out.

Burstein: Yeah. It was a zombie, but you've got to think about what will people think when they open the email and see that.

Nurnberger: You know, I was just ... I can't take credit for it, but I was just reading an article this morning about how there is no such thing anymore as B2B or B2C marketing, it's human to human marketing. And I think, at least in, you know, my little world of B2B technology, I'm seeing that more and more, and this is a perfect example of somebody not wanting those creepy wet eyes staring back at them from their PC.

Burstein: Yeah. I totally agree. And when I was in B2B too, we always felt like we are actually writing and marketing to humans. And keep in mind, you know, humans have their own hopes and fears and dreams aside from what they're doing at work. I mean, I think the zombie example is a great way. One, as you said, you scared some people with what's scaring back at them. But also to tie into something that ... these are human beings outside of the job, and they might be interested in "World War Z," or zombies, or anything else like that.

So we have another question here from Phyllis: "What are best practices for analyzing third-party channels?" So this was mostly to your own audience, right? Why did you focus on your own audience? I think timing came into that.

Nurnberger: Timing and speed to market absolutely came into that. So we originally cooked up the idea late March, so in order to get this ready and executed, and executed well, by the time of the "World War Z" launch, there were only so many channels we could pick. We wanted to put our eggs in the basket where we felt like we were going to get the most return.

We do a lot of content syndication, we do a lot of marketing with third-party channels, and I'd say the same rigor around optimization and testing applies with any third-party channels. We've been pretty successful in negotiating down to specific types of leads with our vendors that we pay, you know, cost per lead. We're very much monitor and optimize any of our content syndication literally on a daily basis, to understand where we're showing up, what's converting.

And not just what's getting handed over from the content syndication provider, like Netline or TechTarget or Madison Logic, but again, we're measuring it all the way through pipeline and convert it to closed one. So when, you know, these vendors come back and they say, "Well, we passed you 800 leads, and we achieved our lead commit." It's like, no, no, no. It doesn't matter. What we're focus on is the leads that actually make it to qualified pipeline and then qualified converted opportunities. We hold those third-party vendors to the same standard that we hold our own campaigns to, and really manage them pretty much the same way.

Burstein: Excellent. And what you see here is a retargeting email. Like you said, that's kind of a third email channel they went out to. And there was also a landing page for a registration form, where people could sign up to win an actual zombie survival kit from that email.

And we have a question here from Anne: "How can you quickly repurpose content across multiple channels?" And the interesting thing was what they were signing up to win was actually your direct mail campaign to the senior level executives, right?

Nurnberger: Right. Exactly. So we saw so much popularity around the direct mail program, we thought we had some extras, we created some extras, we might as well open it up to a broader population and give folks the opportunity to win one of these zombie survival kits.

And the response was crazy. People were clamoring to get their hands on these zombie survival kits. It was pretty fun to see.

Burstein: So you had a flash drive, and this had a custom video, actually, that talked specifically, named the person that received it, and told them they were about to get a zombie survival kit. And then step two was a zombie survival kit with some more content reused here, as we see that brochure, that was actually the white paper that people could download from the email.

But I want to talk about one more really clever content reuse you had. You took the same direct mail piece and you used it for your AR and PR outreach. And you want to tell us a little bit about the results with that?

Nurnberger: Sure. So as I mentioned earlier, after a pretty quiet period of SunGard public relations and analyst relations activity, we really needed to do something to get back on top of the radar of our key media and analyst constituents. So again, this was very, very targeted, looking at the key publications, the key reporters within those publications that we wanted to be able to get in front of.

And their response was fantastic. Rachel Dynes, who's a key analyst for us from Forrester, was tweeting about it. John Valencie from Gardner, another key analyst for us, was tweeting about it. It landed us an interview for three of our customers in the Wall Street Journal. It was a great tool to just get back in front of people that had, you know, hadn't heard from us. We literally got feedback saying, "You know, I remember SunGard Availability Services, but I don't quite recall, like, what exactly you guys do." So it was a really fun campaign, and a great way to get in front of that audience.

And I think the other reason it worked well. A lot of the reporters said it had been so long since they got a hard copy media kit.

That direct mail has just gone by the wayside, that just to receive anything in a big cool box got their attention.

Burstein: Yeah. Think outside the digital box, right?

So we had a question here from Jack: "How did you engage your PR agency to follow up with prospects after the two direct mailings?" That was key, right? After they received the actual direct mailer, then there were some specific follow-up, much like the sales team followed up with the C-level executives.

Nurnberger: Yes. So the PR firm helped us with the targeting, so they were working with us hand in hand to determine the right reporters and the right publications. And then, you know, after the second wave hit, the PR firm had total responsibility and accountability for reaching out to those reporters and, you know, making sure they got the kit, asking them if they had any questions, tying the dots back to our value proposition. And our PR firm, Edelmann, did an exceptional job with that.

Burstein: And lastly, you integrated social media. You got almost 2,000 shares from having this social sharing button there. And I want to really emphasize, people will see the social sharing button and say, "Okay, can I just plop a social sharing button on my campaigns and get 2,000 shares?" I think you got those shares because it was such an intriguing and interesting campaign that really hit people, so nice job there.

But let's ... we have about a minute left, so let's let you talk about the top three takeaways you would tell other marketers about this campaign.

Nurnberger: Yeah. I think that I certainly learned not to discount older, traditional direct marketing methods. I had been very anti-direct mail for quite some time. I said it's expensive, it's cumbersome, and if you don't have the right marketing automation and integration with sales processes in place, then your ability to measure this is pretty loose. And so for the amount of money that you spend on direct mail, I think if you exhaust the system and the processes for the follow-up for the targeting to really measure the impact, it can be a very effective vehicle to break through the clutter.

I think that the biggest lesson I learned is have fun. I am loving the fact that at SunGard Availability Services, we've got a management team that supports us in taking risks and making a little bit of fun of ourselves. I'm not sure if anybody has seen our holiday resiliency videos. If you go up to my LinkedIn page, you should be able to find them there. But we did a series of three videos around the holidays, basically for an IT professional, how to get through the holidays with your family.


Huge response. Because they were just ... it was funny. It was meaningful, and it actually connected with what we do with our value proposition, but it also was a good dose of humor. And I think, you know, with the zombie campaign, we caught lightning in a bottle in being able to create. .. to connect something that was so relevant in pop culture with something that so ties into our value proposition. We're now constantly trying to push ourselves to figure out how we can continue to do that.

And sometimes, unfortunately, you have to react and do things on-the-fly-based stuff that's happening in the media or the entertainment world. We just did a ... we just completed a video parody of "What Does the Fox Say?", but we did it from the perspective of "What Does the Boss Say?" The boss being the CIO. And so, you know, sometimes you just have to hop on those cheesy bandwagons when they exist, if you've got something creative and fun to do with it that ties back to your business.

Burstein: Oh, yeah. And it's just such a great example. You didn't sponsor. You didn't pay anybody to sponsor the "World War Z" movie. Just a great example of what David Newman Scott calls "newsjacking."

So Diana wrote in to say, "Just want to say what a great campaign it certainly was, Christine. Thank you so much for spending the time to prepare for this webinar and for joining us today."

Nurnberger: Thank you so much. And I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter, happy to answer questions at any time. I love this stuff. I'm passionate about B2B marketing, and really driving revenue exceptional marketing. So good stuff.

Burstein: And hopefully people can meet you at the Email Summit, too. And I'm glad to say your power lasted the entire 30 minutes. I hope that bodes well for the rest of your day. And thanks to everyone who tuned in, and you can see many more case studies at marketingsherpa.com.