Building Awareness Through Shocking Targeting Tactics

Sysdig’s mission is to make every cloud deployment secure and reliable. Its marketing team tasked April Six with the creation of a new brand-awareness campaign. Its previous campaign theme, “Secure Your Cloud from Source to Run,” accurately described what Sysdig does but offered little differentiation or emotional connection with its audience. Security architects (CISOs) are often overwhelmed by alerts with little context to know which alerts are critical to address. The new campaign needed to give them confidence that they could effectively manage cloud risk by seeing, in a glance, which alerts pose the most serious threats and merit immediate attention.

The campaign developed by April Six acknowledges the challenge CISOs face—continuously mitigating security risk in the cloud—while making the point that, without separating urgent risk from the everyday variety, you’re just swimming in noise. We wanted the audience to know that, by eliminating the chaos of undifferentiated alerts and prioritizing urgent cloud and container risk in real time, Sysdig had their backs. Prioritized security embedded throughout the development cycle “from source to run” means less noise, less time spent chasing down false alarms, and less worry of missing critical notifications.

As a universally recognized symbol of risk, nothing beats a shark. We can all imagine finding ourselves face-to-face with such a creature—a security threat of the highest order. The visual execution places a safely-caged diver in the company of a shark, communicating the idea of “Risk, prioritized.” Supporting the concept, April Six planned and executed a global integrated program with high-impact out-of-home (OOH) placements at key industry events and digital media executions to expand awareness. The media plan leveraged multiple tactics and high-impact ad units to reach audiences in contextually relevant environments, while also driving awareness through content. Multiple data sources helped to ensure that the campaign reached audiences at every point of the research/purchase journey, and those targeting tactics were further optimized based on performance metrics.