Digital Marketing in EDA...with No Hands on the Wheel

Years (decades) ago, Robert Townsend, the CEO of Avis, faced a problem. Hertz was several times as big as Avis. Avis was losing money. He asked the Bill Bernbach, the head of his advertising agency DDB, how he could effectively get $2 of advertising for every $1 he spent. Bill said that he should simply promise to run whatever ads they came up with. Unchanged. "You will have every creative in my office moonlighting on your account." As it happened, nobody was that happy with the "we try harder" campaign that they had come up with...but Townsend had promised to run the ads unchanged. They ran for 50 years.

OneSpin faced a similar challenge as a startup in formal verification. How to "get around the big guys" (that would be Cadence's JasperGold for one). They focused on niches that were small but forecast to grow fast. But how to reach potential customers in an era without a press, where cold-calling doesn't work, where emails don't get opened? Digital marketing seemed like it might be the answer. Dave Kelf, who was VP marketing at OneSpin at the time said:

We’ve got to get into this, we need to find a young kid who's outside of EDA and hire him.

They did. They found Nicolas Athanasopoulos and hired him from 3M.

Somehow ESD Alliance persuaded him (and Dave, who has since moved to Breker Systems) to present a half-day workshop on digital marketing, held recently at the SEMI HQ in Milpitas. It was the best $30 I've spent in a long time.

Digital Marketing Workshop Case Study

How many RTL designers are there? How many do formal verification? If you made a video about formal verification (or whatever your EDA thing is), how many views do you think it would get?

OneSpin made the video below. It cost $2,600 ($2K for the videographer, $600 to rent the car) plus some internal resources (the "actress" is OneSpin's marcom manager, McKenzie Ross). They ran the video in a Twitter campaign, orchestrated by (then) new hire Nicolas, with a budget of €300 (that is not a typo, under $400), directing it to people who follow @semiengineering, @cadence, and a few more.

The video was used to drive traffic to a special landing page, and if the visitor "converted", they signed up for either a 30-minute webinar or to download a white paper (on the spot).

Results: 106,000 people saw the video in 29 days. It was passed around in large companies like Samsung and Renesas that they didn't really have access to. They also ran a Google AdWords campaign in parallel, with a budget of €1200 (about $1500). As Dave said:

I’ve been in EDA 28 years and this is the most successful campaign I’ve ever been involved with

Of course, not everyone who watched the video was a chip designer. But when videos start to be shared, the sharing can come back in. Someone shares the video with their friends, and some of their friend's friends are designers.

The EDA sales cycle is 9 months and nobody is going to buy an EDA tool starting from a cute video. Wrong. OneSpin took several people through their "conversion funnel" from watching a video, to signing up on the landing page, to actually making a sale. In one case they closed a reference sale in 90 days. Without an evaluation since all their questions had already been answered. Nicolas wasn't allowed to say how much business they had generated, it's confidential to OneSpin, but he did say that the total contract value generated is large, and the return on investment is "off the scale, the ROI is thousands of percent".

Jim Hogan

Jim Hogan "opened" the morning. I put "opened" in quotes because he got stuck in traffic and so it was like the baseball season: opening day isn't the first game of the season. Here (lightly edited) is what he said:

I have 16 companies at any given time we are invested in, launching products, and generally innovative. And it’s hard. So how do we do it? It takes $3M to get to the point where you have a technology, but quite a bit more to launch a product and the channel. Anything that accelerates that is good. But we have lost visibility on how to launch product since the publications went, and you are left with Cooley to deal with. For a user piece it's the best place, but with no analytics as to who read it.

So Scott Seiden, who was working with Sonics, said “Hey Jim, we should do this inbound marketing stuff”. So we hired a company. Those guys didn’t know our industry, and we were helping them a lot too. That’s fine, but I'm not in the business of creating ad agencies.

Next, I was at a OneSpin board meeting and Dave was marketing guy and said “We have to figure this out. We’re doing a lot of shows, great staff, great writers, so how do we do it.” McKenzie joined us, Nicolas we found, and he has a Masters degree in this stuff, and so we started doing it in-house.

I’m convinced we have to do it. I want to close in 90 days…that’s incredibly quick. We got first reference sale with no eval.

Another example, outside of EDA. I'm starting a couple of blockchain companies. The hunger for people to learn about blockchain is amazing. But don’t focus on the company or the product, focus on education.

This stuff is really working. I’m a believer.

Or, continuing the somewhat evangelical tone, opening the morning Dave said:

This will change your life if you are into marketing, and have a little skill.

Watch for a future post on Breakfast Bytes with some of the more prescriptive details on what to do that Dave and Nicolas presented.

See ESD Alliance Workshop on Digital Marketing.

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