Our work for Micom
Communications Corp.
Micom Communications Corp. was the world leader in integrating voice and fax with data over phone and IP. (they have since been absorbed into NorTel.)
When we began working with Micom, they were just another maker of garden-variety stat muxes.
We named and introduced the Micom Marathon, the first integration multiplexer. That product line soon took off, creating a manufacturing problem for Micom. If they had been able to build enough equipment to meet demand, they would have sold more than the $20 million worth of Marathons they shipped in the first year.
The Marathon was a breakthrough technology, but it was hard to sell, because the savings advantage did not accrue to the data processing people who would have to incorporate the equipment. The savings were in telephone toll costs--usually the province of the COO and office manager, who would normally have major trepidation about involving themelves in IS.
The ads had to perform a balancing act--being not too sophisticated for the office managmenet, but causing the data processing managers to be interested in company savings outside of their area. These were the first ads we did for Micom, circa 1991:
We also did ads for general business magazines and in-flights
More recently, we created ads appealing to data communications decision-makers
We created a special ad for the supermarket industry
Our final campaign began in Fall of 1996. The company was bought and absorbed by Nortel.
