Western Digital Corp., the world’s largest disk drive maker, is looking for a new advertising strategy and partner to boot.
Melyssa Banda, head of the Irvine-based company’s marketing and communications, said it has hired Select Resources International in Santa Monica to conduct a review of agencies “capable of delivering global strategies that propel the business and [inspire] creative that breaks through to both consumer and business audiences.”
Western Digital, which has 84,072 employees and competes with chief rival Seagate Technology LLC in Cupertino, had $15.1 billion in revenue in the 12 months through June, the end of its fiscal year.
Its annual marketing budget is $30 million to $40 million, according to sources familiar with the company’s marketing operations.
R&R Partners
The fee its current agency of record, R&R Partners Inc. in Las Vegas, collects is estimated to be $4 million to $5 million a year.
The agency, best known for the hit campaign “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” created for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority in 2003, has had the Western Digital account since 2011.
It developed the company’s first branding effort two years ago, dubbed “Absolutely,” which aimed to trigger an emotional connection with consumers and to keep Western Digital’s data storage products above commodity status.
“It’s a very competitive marketplace—you can’t charge a gazillion dollars for something, but we’re going be able to at least maintain our price competiveness,” Catherine Scott, then vice president of corporate communications for Western Digital, said at the time of the campaign. She left the company in December 2013 after 25 years to grow MBC Design, her own marketing shop in Mission Viejo.
The first batch of TV ads featured external hard drives traveling from a factory conveyor belt into the lives of everyday people while a narrator relayed the company’s brand message:
“We don’t see magic in anything we make, we see magic in what you make—masterpieces painted with pixels, symphonies composed with keyboards, cinéma vérité directed with smartphones,” the narrator said.
R&R Partners said on its website that the campaign achieved a “28% lift in North American sales” within five months of its January 2013 launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Western Digital supported it with $16 million in media placements, about double what it spent last year.
“Absolutely” translated poorly overseas, though, sources close to the matter say. And Banda, who took over as marketing head in January 2014, is now looking for an agency with global support, like Deutsch Inc. in Los Angeles, part of London-based Interpublic Group of Cos., which is valued at $8.8 billion, or 180LA in Santa Monica, owned by Omnicom Group Inc. in New York, whose market value is about $19 billion—$4 billion less than Western Digital’s.
R&R is an independent agency with one office outside the U.S. in Mexico City.
Edelman in Los Angeles will continue to handle the company’s public relations and social media duties, Western Digital said.
R&R Partners didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether it plans to defend the account.
Campaigns
The agency in 2011 helped the tech giant launch its first advertising campaign to focus on the general public, called “My Book Live.” R&R Partners also worked on Western Digital’s Sentinel Campaign in 2012 that promoted its small-office storage server to the business community.
It followed in 2014 with the “My Cloud” campaign, whose objective was to position Western Digital’s network-attached storage servers “as a better, safer, and more cost-effective solution to more popular services like iCloud and Google Drive,” according to R&R.
R&R’s site said the effort resulted in 20% sales growth in the category.
Recent creative ads developed by the agency use the cloud metaphor to show people on the move—be it mom in the kitchen, a businessman at the airport, or a young man on a train—each with his or her own white cloud hovering above and providing access to personal data for continuous connection.
Western Digital also released a two-minute commercial over the holiday season featuring Banda and company President Jim Murphy. The idea for the ad was generated in-house and executed by Burbank-based agency Petrol. The video, which amassed more than 1 million views on YouTube, shows Western Digital’s employees around the world helping a boy film a holiday greeting for his grandfather.
