A cybersecurity breach can have disastrous consequences on businesses: lost revenues, lawsuits, investigations, bad press. Therefore, IT security experts have a critical role. When they invest in a cybersecurity solution, they need to be confident that it will provide the protection their business needs and help them quickly recover from a problem. As a major network actor, Cisco is able to detect and contain a data breach much faster than any of its competitors.

However, in 2021, awareness and preference for Cisco’s security portfolio have been in decline. As a company, Cisco needed to make a move and establish itself as more than “just” a networking company: a leader in cybersecurity.

The objectives were to increase Familiarity of Cisco Security (measured through Cisco’s RepTrak brand study) and compel IT Decisions Makers to learn more about Cisco’s security offering.

Security incidents can happen and freeze your business, but with Cisco tech, you can rest easy.

We wanted to illustrate this promise through the journey of a down-to-earth heroine across an entirely (and literally) frozen company after a security breach.

The film opens with a glitching screen and the alarming super “You have been breached” but the dancing and the upbeat music show that there is no real cause for worry. Our heroine smoothly traverses various business locations of the same company, from the facility store to the company HQ. She helps restore order and enjoys a little fun along the way.

At the end of her journey, empowered by Cisco’s solutions, she unfreezes everything and is revealed to be the IT expert.

Her casualness and humor contrast with the chaos of the frozen business, strange situations, disheveled hair and bring a comedic and stylish dimension.

Through 3rd party research and 1:1 interviews with Cisco’s subject-matter-experts, we learned cybercrime is the #1 crime in the world. Its costs will hit $10.5 trillion by 2025.

Faced with these alarming figures, we can no longer consider cybersecurity as a geek fad: it is a central business issue. Thus, our challenge was to broaden our target with a positive movie and draw the attention of the entire boardroom while keeping the IT decision makers interested. There is a little something for everyone in Freeze:

· Retail store scene: sales/customer experience VP

· Factory scene: operations VP

· Home scene: HR VP

· HQ scene: CFO/CEO

· Positive heroine: the CTO/CISO!

Understanding by 2025, 75% of the company’s workforce and potential buyers be millennials and Gen Z, we put a heavy emphasis on audio as a distinct brand language. An exclusive song was composed for the film.

It premiered in Las Vegas at the Cisco Partner Summit on the 1st of November. 5000 Cisco key partners discovered it at once in a room bigger than the biggest US movie theater.

The film was aired on major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, FOX, Reddit, Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube, as well as all Samsung and LG streaming TV devices (1,342 spots, 169.3M broadcast impressions) accompanied by digital paid media advertisements across the US, the UK, Germany, India, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand (42.4M digital impressions)

91% of IT Decision Makers are NFL fans, so these campaign assets were also included as part of a funnel campaign highlighting Cisco’s cybersecurity solutions powering State Farm Stadium and Super Bowl LVII week, including gameday.  

The campaign successfully demonstrated to business leaders how Cisco can secure a network. Early results show IT decision makers believe Cisco is pushing itself beyond networking into a broader security role. It deepened their awareness of Cisco as a superior security partner and drove a desire to learn more about what makes Cisco’s offerings unique (+2 points in familiarity, Cisco’s RepTrak). After viewing the campaign, 73% of IT experts answer positively to the statement: “Cisco secures my network better than any other company” (Cisco Ad Evaluation, 2023). The film also solidifies Cisco as a “innovative” company (+17%).

In addition to changing perception and increasing familiarity the campaign influenced 2.1 million visits to cisco.com and customer engagement on 121,000 accounts. It also helped capture demand for customer and partner-led sales enablement programs with $154 million marketing sourced pipeline and $720 million marketing engaged pipeline.