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Tony Hallett's After These Messages: "I'm a celebrity CIO"
Get outta here

By Tony Hallett

Published: Friday 06 February 2004

Who would you trust more: the CEO of a company selling a product or the CIO of a company using that product? Tony Hallett thinks he knows what you'd answer...

Who said this column was only about TV and web-based advertising? I want to turn to print.

HP is placing a series of ads at the moment with quite a different focus to its '+HP' campaign, which is very much a cross-media pitch. These take the form of full-page copy entitled 'Confessions of the World’s Most Demanding CIOs'. It features the IT and operations director of Barclaycard and CTO of Reuters, both from its UK client roster, and the CIOs of FedEx and GM from the US.

Meanwhile, turn over a page in The Economist these days (a place where the HP CIO campaign can also be found) and we're greeted by the pixelated, though still clearly close-to-smiling, face of Delta Airlines' CIO in an ad for Citrix software, with a quotation about effectively deploying an ERP application.

The idea that a company's customers are its best mouthpiece is nothing new. It's been a tactic of marketing departments for years, and others are in on that act as well now - witness front page ads in the FT where Oracle boasts of a local user, for example, the Yorkshire Building Society.

What is interesting is the positioning of the individuals here. We are used to the person heading up IT in an organisation being faceless. Even if an implementation or general supplier relationship goes well, what would the odds have been 10 years ago of an MD or even some other departmental boss taking the credit? It is good to see the CIOs stepping up.

So we get Barclaycard IT director Steve Adams (an upcoming subject of The McCue Interview on silicon.com) talking about IT but also about the very real effects that IT has on the credit card company's business, in areas such as customer service. He is clearly at the heart of the business.

I predict that we will see more of this type of campaign. It doesn't work in the broadcast mainstream, but in the business press it is powerful. Perhaps of paramount importance is that there are users available - and qualified - to be part of such campaigns.

silicon.com writes in large part for the sort of people featured in such adverts. Perhaps what's most encouraging is that there are increasingly more of them. Sure, not all have come up through the IT ranks - something columnist Rene Carayol lamented recently in a piece provocatively called 'The death of the CIO' - but they are hammering home that the only thing that matters is the business. IT should never be sexy for its own sake.

What's also clear, from silicon.com columnists such as Rene Carayol and David Taylor, who were both once IT directors, to Barclaycard's Adams, who has this year been elevated to COO of Barclaycard International, is that for CIOs and other IT leaders who take this route there are still plenty of upward career options.

Could it possibly be that we have an advertising phenomenon that is good for the individuals involved, their employers, those suppliers who are paying for the campaigns and even those reading the publications, who are in some cases the individuals' peers?