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CLIENT: Raindance Communications
PR: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
BUDGET: N/A
TIMEFRAME: September - November 2004 200442004
The business world at large has been slow to warm to the promise of Web conferencing, a technological advance supposed to ease the tedium of what comedian John Cleese once famously referred to as "meetings, bloody meetings." Held back initially due to the cumbersome nature of its operation and its cost factors, it was only a matter of time before some new technology would make Web conferencing more practical and appealing.
So when Boulder, Colo.-based Raindance Communications, a provider of integrated Web- and audio-conferencing services, planned to launch its new and improved version last September, the challenge became how to grab the attention of a jaded marketing community already overburdened with free gifts, promotions and pitches.
The solution, cooked up by Raindance's chief marketing officer, Brian Burch, and a team at the Denver office of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, was to introduce the Raindance Online Institute (ROI), offering marketers in targeted industries a free trial of the service itself (Raindance Meetings Edition).
Potential users could log on to a restricted Web site and participate in seminars on such subjects as building customer loyalty and fostering an entrepreneurial spirit. Delivered by such top marketing authors as Seth Godin, author of "Permission Marketing" and "Free Prize Inside," and Guy Kawasaki, author of "The Art of the Start," each speaker was scheduled to speak two or three times during a two-month period.
The target market was 200,000 CEOs, product managers, heads of marketing and those responsible for generating leads in companies worth more than $50 million in the financial, telecommunications, high-tech, manufacturing, healthcare and professional-service industries. Research had identified those sectors as having a business model that lent itself to collaboration. "It was important that they didn't require as much education when it came to technology," Burch says. "They were...