Genuity Continues Brand Ads, Promotes VOIP

Internet infrastructure player Genuity is taking to the airwaves with a branding campaign designed to address security and reliability.

The new television campaign, which debuted Thursday during the NBC broadcast of the PGA Tour’s Genuity Championship, seeks to highlight Woburn, Mass.-based Genuity’s experience in integrating multiple managed Internet infrastructure services. Spending was not disclosed.

The first of two spots personifies the disparate elements of a company’s infrastructure, demonstrating how poor management can lead to security crises. In the ad, data network components bicker about who’s at fault for an unidentified problem. While they’re doing so, two hackers (passing themselves off as “vendors”) slip past the components. A voiceover closes the spot with “Want a more secure network? At Genuity, we manage and maintain every inch of your network.”

The second commercial focuses on Genuity’s services that can boost business reliability, by highlighting a network that uses its Black Rocket Voice service. Black Rocket Voice, a voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) service for businesses, allows a company to combine its phone and data traffic on the company’s network, ideally saving money.

As discussed in the ad, the product also means that a company can still have voice services even when traditional phone service would be lost. In the spot, the “living” data network components are coping with a loss of phone services — which are easily restored by a new component, “IP Voice.” A voiceover intones, “Want to keep your business up and running? Genuity’s Black Rocket combines voice and data on a single, secure network.”

For the next several months, the two spots will air on MSNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN International-Europe, the NBA Playoffs on TBS, and on NBC this summer during sporting events like Wimbledon Tennis and the PGA Championship.

Similarly-themed business magazine and banner ad executions also are slated for later this month.

The campaign, designed by Wenham, Mass.-based agency of record Mullen, is especially timely considering several recent — and well-publicized — industry-wide security and reliability woes.

Particularly hard-hit in recent months has been software giant Microsoft , which is coping with a handful of security concerns, made all the more embarrassing by chairman Bill Gates’ recent directive for the company to focus on making bulletproof products.

Open-source software also took a hit earlier this week, with the discovery that the widely-used PHP scripting language contained a vulnerability that hackers could exploit. Similarly, the new version of the Linux kernel was also found to have a security hole in its firewall software.

For Genuity, those sorts of developments make its message even more resonant.

“The campaign emphasizes that Genuity offers services focused on security and business continuity, which recent research shows are top-of-mind issues for CEOs and CIOs,” said Jan Ledbetter, vice president of marketing communications at Genuity. “Now more than ever, it’s important to keep our brand prominent.”

The ads are the latest effort from Genuity, which last year debuted a branding campaign highlighting its 30-year heritage in Internet infrastructure. Following its spin-out from GTE in 2000, Genuity tapped Mullen for a series of spots promoting the company’s Black Rocket network platform.

Editor’s note: Saunders writes for the Internet Advertising Report, an internet.com site.

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