Worry About Everything But IT

Tripwire is a cybersecurity and compliance software company with a new SaaS-based Configuration Manager that promises to dramatically simplify the lives of IT professionals at small-to-medium-sized businesses. To expand beyond the brand’s core audience of enterprise businesses, including Chevron, Allstate, Sony, and Walgreens, Tripwire needed to introduce its new product to IT professionals at businesses of all sizes. That’s when they turned to PMG.

Forty-three percent of cyber-attacks target small businesses. Yet when it comes to SMBs, there is typically only one decisionmaker for the company’s IT decisions – one overworked, overstressed, IT pro juggling multiple security threats (not to mention setting up VPNs, fixing bugs, and explaining to Carl what exactly a keychain is). Further research into this unique demographic uncovered an audience with a passion for learning, technology, and a healthy diet of niche meme humor.

Our strategic planning and insights team set a strategy to target SMB IT managers – professionals who are smart, utilitarian, and wary of anything that smells like a sales pitch.

We developed a hilarious (if dark) campaign specifically tailored for the professional cynic. The main message: Tripwire Configuration Manager is an automated cyber-security product that will let an IT pro whose literal job it is to worry worry less about cloud security and more about everything else, from life-altering macro-evolutions to the delicate moral algorithms of AI, and so on. With agility and efficiency driving the creative placements, the media program was developed to take advantage of having the single long-form video cut down into shorter clips for optimization across every platform.

The campaign helped Tripwire connect emotionally with cybersecurity professionals at small and medium sized businesses. It enabled Tripwire to break through to new segments of technology buyers, illustrating to them that while its software was enterprise grade, the solutions it offered were nonetheless viable and accessible to organizations of all sizes. Performance was so strong that Tripwire’s CMO praised the collaborative effort between PMG’s strategy and creative teams and the client’s internal teams.

The campaign successfully shifted the target audience’s mindset from feeling overwhelmed by cybersecurity to seeing Tripwire Configuration Manager as an indispensable tool from a partner who doesn’t just understand them – it is them.