Are you a huge enterprise looking to untether yourself from legacy systems to take full advantage of cloud computing? Is it 2003 and “cloud computing” isn’t even a term yet? If both of these things are true, you probably saw this campaign I created for Sybase, the leader in mobile middleware. Let’s settle on “mobile middleware” for a second. Sound boring? Hell yes. And back in 2003 NOBODY wanted to work on this kind of stuff except me, and the agency I helped establish and was a partner in. Godfrey Q and Partners took on clients that we thought would create our exciting future. It was hard. It was complicated. It was work no one wanted to do, or they did really badly to keep the lights on. But, as you’ll see, this was selling a very real future that we now, just 17 years on, take completely for granted.

One of my favorite things to do is to take really complicated stuff and make it really understandable. In San Francisco’s very first tech boom, there was plenty of that work to go around. I worked on campaigns for Dell, Intel, Micron, Adobe, Macromedia, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Borland, Philips Videoconferencing, Nortel, Sprint Telecommunications, and so much more for this very reason. In the beginning, it all needed a lot of explaining to get people to even understand what they were all trying to do, much less invest in their vision.

Sybase’s vision was already a reality, even back then. They had to convince big businesses that they could do crazy, futuristic things with help from Sybase. Field force automation! Mobile data management! In other words, if you were a big manufacturer, you had a huge opportunity to know where your all your shit was at every stage of delivery. You’d have complete control of every single box that left your facility. Same with healthcare providers! You could see your patient and access their records from a mobile device. You could write a prescription and it would be transmitted securely (a big deal for healthcare!) in real-time to a pharmacist, and then the entire appointment could be stored digitally in the provider’s database. Remember, when we did this work, THE IPHONE WAS STILL 4 YEARS AWAY FROM EXISTING. Sybase made this all happen on handheld PDA’s and the like.

So, enough about me dating myself. What I just explained above was how I originally heard the brief for this project. It kept me awake trying to solve the advertising problem while the account person went on and on about middleware and enterprise solutions and blah, blah, blah. To me, a problem like this wasn’t solved by bold exclamations of how futuristic our offerings were. Cut out the tech speak and explain the advantages in a matter-of-fact way. If this was the way of the future, then we needed to show our customers the roadmap to how they could use it. So that’s exactly what I did. There was a great book by Chronicle Books called, Hitting the Road – The Art of the American Road Map. I used this as an excuse to expense it (FYI, art directors are always looking for excuses to buy pretty art books). It’s a wonderful collection of maps from the past, and I used it for inspiration to create my enterprise maps of the future. Our customers would be Healthcare, Manufacturing, Big Tech and the like, so my landscape had to depict their world. I found an amazing source for this, a company (brilliantly) called Xplane. I sketched out detailed maps of environments (and what would populate them) and they’d whip up ultra-detailed monochromatic versions. To this day, I marvel at their environments. Then I’d spotlight areas of the map in color and arrange them in an order that naturally led you from point A to C (or D) naturally, without numbering them or using dotted lines or whatever. And in lieu of a headline, I designed a modern version of the old map title graphic. In the end we literally showed businesses a roadmap to their future.

Ok, fun-fact time! I added a little secret Easter egg to every ad. C’mon, there was so much going on in those backgrounds, who could resist? And it was super innocent. The only people who knew were me, and my amazing production house rep (Hi, Oksana!). To every environment, we had Xplane add a person walking along holding hands with a monkey.