Talking B2B Tech: Gil Rosen

The Chief Marketing Officer for Amdocs is on a mission to make his brand, his business and his customers’ experiences amazing. He’s tearing up the B2B rulebook in order to do it.

It’s hard to imagine even the most cutting-edge consumer business relaunching its brand by asking an up-and-coming musician to write a song about its spirit. It’s even harder to imagine this campaign coming from a B2B tech company; hardest of all to imagine that this B2B tech company has been around for 40 years, developing and operating the largely unseen technology and infrastructure of the telecom and media worlds that ultimately enables billions around the world on a daily basis.

As it happens, you don’t have to imagine these things, because Gil Rosen, the Chief Marketing Officer of Amdocs has spent the last year making them happen. ‘Make it Amazing’ is the title of the single and video written by the rapidly up-and-coming Israeli artist Noga Erez that’s been lighting up both YouTube and LinkedIn over the last few months. It’s also the new brand identity of Amdocs itself – one that’s inviting customers employees and in-demand tech talent to take a fresh, energized look at what the business can mean for them.

When always delivering isn’t enough

“When I started my role as CMO, I put some very simple questions in front of my management colleagues,” says Rosen. “Who are we? Whom do we serve? What’s the impact of what we do? Amdocs’ identity had been built around the concept of ‘always deliver’ which basically described what we did. But ‘always deliver’ isn’t something you wake up in the morning for – and people today want to be a part of something meaningful. They’re really looking into the essence of companies to try and understand their purpose. Our ‘Make it Amazing’ message is saying to our customers, ‘go, take our products and launch amazing products and services for your customers.’ Instead of fixating on our product, we’re looking at the impact of our software on the world.”

Rosen is adamant that the scope of that impact has been transformed over the last decade – and that tech businesses like Amdocs need to respond to the new opportunities and expectations that this creates. It’s a conviction that’s formed during a career that’s come full circle – and brought him back to Amdocs after helping to lead innovation for major telecoms players like Deutsche Telekom and Israel’s Bezeq.

“There’s something about Amdocs that draws you back,” he says. “It’s the heart and dedication and professionalism of the people, but also the excitement of a business that has a real global perspective and not just a local one – working on diverse projects for diverse companies. Coming back, I found the company to be much more innovative, dynamic and diverse than it had been when I left. Our purpose is much more significant than it used to be in the context of what communication companies now mean to society and the world. We’re not just providing a phone line like we did in the past.”

So-so is a no-go

The genesis of the ‘Make it Amazing’ brand and campaign can be found in Rosen’s view of the centrality of technology to society today – and how this will only increase over the coming few years. “Technology is the oxygen of modern life,” he says. “And we can’t even imagine what it will look like 15 years from now with the metaverse as part of that life. It’s not just about gaming – what about the possibilities for industry? Healthcare? Surgery? Education? The impact will be profound. In order to make it work, you need the amazing capabilities of great communications companies – and behind every great communications company, you’ll find Amdocs. We’re one of the major building blocks that make these amazing services possible.”

After taking on the Amdocs CMO role in November 2020, Rosen started the process of bringing this positioning to life both internally and externally – a process that led to ‘Make it Amazing’ – and the partnership with Noga Erez.

“We were clear from the start that she was going to write the lyrics – and that we didn’t want them to mention Amdocs at all,” he recalls. “It was a song about the spirit of the company. She created the line, ‘so-so is a no-go’ and that’s become a mantra within our business that’s holding us to a new standard for all of our processes – from now we onboard employees to how we run meetings. It’s about a state of mind, and that’s something that’s true of all energizing ideas. Think of Nike and ‘Just Do It’ – it doesn’t talk about sport, it’s bigger than that.”

Rosen and his team were determined that so-so should have no place when it came to the launch of the ‘Make it Amazing’ campaign. They worked with Noga Erez to co- create a spectacular video set within a pinball game, released it on YouTube where it became the most watched piece of advertising content for four consecutive months – and launched it on LinkedIn with a daring piece of innovative, organic marketing.

“We call it a digital rain campaign, where we organize the entire company with personalized versions of the same asset and then at a set date and time, everyone uploads their personal post with that content,” explains Rosen. “If you’re connected to Amdocs employees, your feed gets taken over. Using the LinkedIn platform as an organic megaphone has been immensely successful for us.”

Why B2B audiences are bigger than you believe

That LinkedIn launch strategy sits at the intersection of two audiences that Rosen considers hugely important for Amdocs. He believes passionately that a B2B tech brand needs to engage current and future employees at scale – at the same time as generating an emotional response across the organizations that a business sells to.

“We used to refer to ourselves as a B2-40 business rather than a B2B business,” he says. “And that’s because our 40 biggest customers represented the bulk of our revenues. But when you break that down, you’ve got 40 CIOs who each manage thousands of people who could be part of the decision-making process. Then you’ve got CMOs, CFOs and others who are also part of the decision, all of their people working on RFPs – just within our customers, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people who are touching and using our software. Now, think about our 30,000 employees and the half a million people potentially applying to our business – and the millions of people around the world in college campuses who we need to employ in the future. Then think about their families, all of whom influence their decisions. Our audience from a marketing perspective is far wider than we’ve previously acknowledged.”

Listen to Rosen talk about audiences and outcomes and you have a breath-taking vision of the wider value that marketing can deliver to a B2B tech business. And when the potential value is so wide-ranging, there are many different ways in which it can manifest itself.

“All of a sudden, you had tens of thousands of people visiting our website and staying there for longer learning about what we do,” he says. “We had more CVs coming in and increased conversion rates, in that the people sending those CVs were relevant people who actually wanted to work for us and applied. And we have the same thing for customers, tracking the impact on our brand through surveys. More fundamentally, it’s changing the language of the conversations that our sales teams have. Customers now understand how aligned we are with their objectives.”

Being part of something bigger in B2B

That type of emotional reassurance is something that Rosen sees as hugely important in B2B – and an element of marketing that’s too often neglected. “News flash – we’re all people,” he says. “And actually, when you make a decision on enterprise software, you’ve got much more of a personal stake than when you buy a can of Coke or a pair of Nikes. I was convinced that we needed to create content that will touch people on a personal level, never mind that we’re a B2B company. Whether you’re buying from us, coming to work for us or work for us already, this is the club that you’re going to belong to.”

It’s a club that Rosen believes can grow to include the world’s top tech talent, its most influential technology businesses and its most important customer experiences. And the promise to all members is that Amdocs will make it amazing.

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