Cognos
Taking a Leader to the Next Level of Performance
The Challenge:
Founded in 1969, Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN; TSX: CSN) is a leading provider of business intelligence (BI) and performance planning software for the enterprise, with more than $500 million in annual revenues. Their software solutions allow companies to improve and direct corporate performance by enabling all of the key steps in the management cycle—from planning and budgeting, to measuring and monitoring performance, to reporting and analysis. Cognos is the only company to support all of these key management activities with a complete solution that spans all of the essential components of CPM—enterprise planning, scorecarding, and business intelligence. Cognos solutions are sold directly and are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers.
Adaytum and LP&P
In February of 2002, Adaytum secured the services of Lois Paul & Partners (LP&P) to establish the category for the new emerging market of Enterprise Business Planning (EBP), increase media visibility for the company and category, expand analyst relationships, and support the overall marketing efforts to drive awareness of the company to new prospects within the Global 2000.
Through an integrated campaign that leveraged company news, customer win announcements, funding and product updates/introductions, LP&P was able to frequently deliver consistent messages of success from Adaytum to raise quantity and quality of coverage in business and trade press. LP&P implemented an analyst relations program to ensure the underlying messages, category definitions, and future predictions of enterprise business planning were consistent among all of the analysts at AMR Research, Hurwitz, Giga, Gartner, IDC and META. LP&P also implemented a customer qualification program to capture the stories of more than 25 Adaytum customers for the purpose of securing references and announcing customer wins. Additionally, as part of Adaytum’s annual user conference, LP&P authored press releases articulating EBP within real time business performance, product direction, corporate momentum and customer adoption, as well as orchestrated Adaytum's inaugural Planning Leadership Awards.
As a result, from February to December of 2002, Adaytum coverage increased 400% and Website traffic increased 60%. Altogether, Adaytum achieved a 633% ROI as compared to equivalent advertising value and reached more than 150 million readers.
Cognos acquires Adaytum:
On December 19, 2002, Cognos announced its intention to acquire Adaytum, due to Adaytum’s leadership position in enterprise planning. With this acquisition Cognos articulated its intent to “take the lead in Corporate Performance Management (CPM), providing deep domain experience in business intelligence, scorecarding, and now enterprise performance planning.” By January 13, 2003, the acquisition had been completed.
Not wanting to lose momentum in the Enterprise Planning space – and hence acquisition value – Cognos chose to maintain relationships with LP&P as well as its existing agency. Upon reviewing the results between the two agencies, in May of 2003 Cognos selected LP&P to be its agency of record.
The LP&P Difference:
At the time LP&P began working with Cognos the corporate performance management (CPM) market was in a nascent stage and most industry analysts believed that true CPM solutions would not begin to be fully implemented until late 2005, early 2006. Cognos wanted to ensure that its leadership position in CPM by leveraging its existing stronghold in the Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics applications spaces with its recent Adaytum acquisition.
LP&P worked with Cognos PR to implement an integrated multi-track plan that addressed Enterprise Planning (EP), Business Intelligence (BI), and corporate initiatives, with each element supporting the overarching theme of CPM.
First and foremost, LP&P worked with Cognos to educate analysts and press on its vision of CPM. LP&P’s goal was to immediately communicate the value for corporations in adopting Enterprise Planning (EP), its synergistic relationship with BI, and the role of EP as an entry point to CPM by increasing the quantity and quality of Cognos’ coverage in vertical, financial, IT and business press publications.
Key to this approach was the “cross-pollination” of the press and analysts. Historically, CFO-targeted and financial press had covered Enterprise Planning, while CTO-targeted and IT press had covered Business Intelligence. LP&P quickly implemented face-to-face meetings with each key target to articulate Cognos’ vision in the evolving CPM market. This served not only to increase Cognos’ footprint with the press, but also marginalize competitive offerings. Through an integrated campaign that leveraged customer wins, favorable analyst reports, financial conferences, partner alliances, and product updates Cognos realized continual increase in coverage.
Cognos Q104 earnings call, taking place June 19, 2003, marked the first time that LP&P had supporting Cognos in calling attention to its financial performance. By leveraging the work that LP&P had conducted beginning in May in supporting Cognos two customer and partner conferences (PLAN2003 and Tech Forum 2003), the business and trade press were “primed” to hear Congos’ results. Through aggressive outreach LP&P secured more than 140 pieces of coverage for Cognos – three times the amount of previous coverage. Coverage included Bloomberg, Reuters, Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones), Investors Business Daily, local business press and electronic media, and appearances on CNN The Money Gang and Bloomberg TV.
As part of the earnings call, CEO Ron Zambonini outlined an upcoming product (ReportNet), highlighting R&D investment, the target market, market opportunity, and product functionality. During the Q&A session of the call, Zambonini made a bold prediction – “"If we don't realize $10 million in ReportNet revenue in our fiscal third quarter, I will do the Q3 earnings conference call naked."
With the “hook” now in place, LP&P adopted a three-phased campaign to call attention to the new product. Immediately following the conference call and into July LP&P and Cognos undertook a campaign to ensure a broader group of trade and business press were fully aware of the new product.
In July and August, LP&P conducted a second phase that provided increasingly more product details. Also during this time, LP&P had suggested Cognos “ring the bell” at the opening of NASDAQ on July 23, 2003. This timing was chosen not only because July represented the “sweet 16” anniversary of Cognos being listed on NASDAQ, but also because Cognos main competitors – Hyperion and Business Objects - would be announcing their earnings July 23rd and July 24th respectively. The timing was chosen to overshadow competitors while also providing Cognos an opportunity to “comment” on the state of the market, while their competitors needed to remain quiet due to “guidance” issues.
As fate would have it – the competition added gasoline to the fire. On July 18th, Business Objects announced their intention to acquire Crystal Decisions and on July 23rd, Hyperion announced its intention to acquire Brio Software. Because of continual outreach Cognos was top of mind with the press. As a result, LP&P was able to quickly “connect” with the press to proactively offer Cognos spokespersons to provide a “competitive-view” of the acquisitions. As a result, Cognos was able to position the acquisitions as reactionary to its upcoming product (ReportNet) or to its holistic approach to CPM (via the Adaytum acquisition of six months prior.).
The final chapter of the product introduction took place in conjunction with a worldwide webcast originating from New York City on September 9, 2003. By outreaching to press over the final week of August and the week leading up to the event, LP&P was able to secure coverage by providing final product details, analyst and customer references and partner endorsements either under NDA the week prior to the event or as part of the event.
From June 24, 2003 through September 11, 2003, LP&P was able to secure more than 100 pieces of coverage including business press such as Barron’s, Bloomberg News, Bloomberg TV, BusinessWeek, Dow Jones, CBS MarketWatch, Forbes.com, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, and Silicon.com; local press and media including The Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star, CJOH-TV, CHRO-TV, CBOT-TV, ROBTV; and trade press including Application Development Trends, Business Intelligence Journal, CIO, CIO Insight, Cnet, Computerworld, CRN, Database Trends & Applications, DM Review, eWeek, IDC, InformationWeek, InfoWorld, Intelligent Enterprise, The451.com, and VARBusiness.
Cognos Q204 earnings call, taking place September 24, 2003, was the final activity that marked the first five months of LP&P supporting the entire Cognos account. Through conducting activities similar to those previously outlined, LP&P secured more than 100 pieces of coverage for Cognos including: AP Newswires, Bloomberg, CBSMarketwatch, Forbes.com, Investors Business Daily, Reuters, Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones); local business press and electronic media, and appearances on Bloomberg TV and CNBC.
The Results:
LP&P’s overall goal was to achieve increased visibility and attention from media influencers, and in turn affect the buying decisions of potential Cognos customers and increase market leadership. Since LP&P and Cognos began their relationship, Cognos has experienced a 30% year-over-year increase in overall coverage, easily surpassing key competitors Business Objects and Hyperion and realized a 200-300% increase in coverage regarding earnings news.
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