Adobe EchoSign Campaign Goes Retro to Attract Print-Reliant Businesses

A new digital and print campaign from Goodby Silverstein & Partners aims to turn business decision-makers onto the cost- and time-saving benefits of electronic signatures via Adobe’s e-signature software EchoSign.

“One of the goals of our campaign was to create an engagement message that people would pay attention to – the target audience of people who are driving core revenue or cost-related business processes within an organization, and trying to do it in a way that had humor, fun, and a visual style that would grab you,” says Mark Grilli, vice president of product marketing for Adobe EchoSign.

In what the company says is its most significant marketing investment to date in EchoSign, Adobe bought full-page print ads on the back page of the Wall Street Journal‘s, plus direct online buys that include first impression buy-outs, business section buy-outs, iPad full-page ads, and a custom overlay unit.

“We were all along thinking about takeover as a model, because it was atypical to the typical corporate message,” Grilli says.

To capture what it calculates is the 60 percent of businesses, from very small to enterprise, that still rely on pen and paper, the campaign features retro-looking graphics that will appear as digital display and skins on business news sites across desktops and mobile devices via three ad networks.

While this is an awareness campaign, Adobe is happy to convert customers, as well, and clicking on the “learn more” button on digital ads leads eventually to a buy button.

Says Grilli, “When doing things online, you always find people further down the funnel that may be interested in trying or buying, so we always give that offramp as part of the campaign.”