• by Aaron Baar , September 15, 2016

Technology solutions company CDW is taking an expanded — and narrowed — approach to reaching potential customers with it’s fall advertising campaign. 

The company, which traditionally runs campaigns during the football and college basketball seasons, is broadening its “IT Orchestration by CDW” effort with a more direct approach to the humor it began in a campaign that launched in March. The new spots, from Ogilvy & Mather Chicago, come from the point of view of individuals adversely affected by CDW’s expertise.

In one spot, for instance, the class clown is no longer viewed as amusing by his peers because CDW’s technology’s make learning more interesting. Another spot depicts a man who loses his individuality when a fanny pack fad catches on. 

“We really liked the humor in the first campaign,” Dean Lamb, director of marketing at CDW, tells Marketing Daily. “We wanted to enhance the storytelling and highlight the benefits of IT orchestration. In the first campaign, we showed who the IT was working for. This time, we wanted to show who it wasn’t working for."  

Like the previous effort, the new spots highlight several of CDW’s strategic partners, including Cisco, Dell, HP, Hewlett Packard and Intel. 

The campaign will include television and radio spots running on an expanded group of channels, such as NFL Network, AMC and HGTV, in addition to its traditional ESPN and CNBC buys. The company will also employ addressable television and account-based marketing, as well as targeted local radio, to reach more potential customers, Lamb says. 

“We did a lot of research coming out of our March campaign and ongoing about whether our customers understood IT orchestration,” Lamb says..”We were rallying seeing great results from our broad reach, and wanted to see what we’d get with a more targeted approach.”