Case Study: IBM "Flashes Up" eNewsletter

In summer 2003, IBM marketing executive Leslie Reiser decided that her division's ForwardView online newsletter for Information Technology professionals was not living up to its name. Rather than seeming forward-looking, the then HTML-based, text-centric publication seemed mired in the past. So Reiser, manager of relationship marketing for IBM small and medium business, hired IQ Television Group, an Atlanta-based marketing agency, to turn things around.

"The text newsletter was not getting the readership results that IBM hoped to be getting," says IQ Television Group president and CEO Tony Quin. "So we decided to give ForwardView the emotional impact of TV plus the power of interactivity." The main tool for doing that was Macromedia Flash. IQ Television "Flashed up" IBM's content, as Quin puts it.

Essentially, the agency’s design professionals took the IBM text-based stories and re-interpreted them to emphasize their visual elements. They tried to convey the same information but with animation and video rather than with text.

"We were looking for ways to distinguish our newsletter," says Reiser. "We wanted a more dynamic communication experience. We wanted to cut through the clutter. And we wanted to show off our stuff."

ForwardView's stuff is not so much IBM products as it is IBM insider knowledge. Published 10 times per year, ForwardView is aimed at IBM customers, prospects, and partners. It provides IBM staff-generated information technology stories to subscribers as well as to individuals known in IBM-speak as "eConsents," which means they are people who have consented to allow IBM to push information to them via emails. Unwilling to give the exact number of ForwardView subscribers and eConsents, IBM is willing only to say that the email newsletter goes out to "several hundred thousand" people.

ForwardView is IBM's attempt to be "a thought leader in its space," according to Quin. Of course, IBM's ultimate hope is that being thought of as a thought leader will ultimately lead to increased sales. But at the same time, it is important that the newsletter maintain its "editorial integrity" by not being too sales-oriented, says Reiser. The intention of the content is to motivate the viewers to either click through to other IBM portals for more information or to click through to the online store to buy IBM products and services. Reiser considers either type of clickthrough as a success for her publication. She sees her main goals for the ForwardView as "relationship building" and "outreach."

In hiring IQ Television Group, Reiser hoped their expertise with Flash would revitalize ForwardView. "HTML is a flat way to get information; it is not compelling," says Reiser.

IQ Television began the ForwardView text-to-video migration as a pilot project in June 2003 and completed it in August. Today's Flashed-up ForwardView seems a lot more like a television news program than a newsletter. Gone are yesterday's 1500-word text-based features, replaced by video-based features that usually require only 90 seconds of a busy executive's time. The result is a more executive-level newsletter that has a broader range of content but is delivered in more bite-sized chunks. Of course, this approach sacrifices depth of information, but viewers can drill down for more in-depth text content, or they can be directed to other IBM portals for more information, something that helps further build customer relationships, according to Reiser. She regards the new and improved ForwardView as "a half step toward Web TV," while Quin says it is "like getting your own personal monthly interactive TV show."