Creative Marketing in Government Contracting

Eric Eden :
0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Alex Love. She is a seasoned marketing executive with many years of experience. She's currently the VP of Marketing for Reva Solutions. Welcome to the show.

Alex Love :
1:14

Thanks so much for having me.

Eric Eden :
1:15

Eric, I think you have a good story you can share with us about some of the marketing that you're most proud of the best marketing you've done.

Alex Love :
1:23

Yeah, absolutely so. One of the campaigns that I'm most proud of actually was never intended to be a campaign and it was never intended to hit the external audience, which makes it even cooler. I think of a story, but since we're both based in the DC area, I'm sure you're well aware government contracting right. A couple of years ago, reva won a really big opportunity in a very large contract called Boss. Government loves acronyms, so it stands for business-oriented software solutions. So we won this contract and only five awardees a really big opportunity for us to make an impact with that client, help them modernize their IT systems.

Alex Love :
1:56

And so it was maybe three or four months into my tenure at the job and I'm thinking, man, I got to go make a big impact. I have to make sure everyone at this agency knows who we are, how do we do this, and naturally, again, the contract goes under protest. So we had about 18 months where the contract was in litigation, waiting award for that to happen, and so during that time, with a very small marketing team, we forgot about it and moved on to other priorities, as a lot of people do in your small teams, small budgets. We have a lot of other things to do. When the contract got re-awarded and it came out that we were going to remain an awardee and we could start work immediately, I thought to myself oh crap, we actually didn't think about any sort of marketing campaign or any sort of introduction at this agency.

Alex Love :
2:38

We had a very small footprint but definitely needed to make a big splash that people knew who we were so it could win additional work on this contract. So with the name Boss it lends itself to, there must be something here. So I actually did all the research, I ran all the strategic plans. I'm like I can't figure out anything that I really want to do with this. Let me go take a walk with my dog, and all the best thoughts happen on walks with your dog or in the shower or those places where you're just like not trying to force it. And so I thought to myself being a Jersey girl boss. That to me means Bruce Springsteen. So how do I incorporate this into a marketing campaign? And I thought to myself we've had 18 months. We really want this agency to see that we haven't been sitting on our laurels for 18 months. We've really been taking this time to be prepared so that day one we can hit the ground running like no time has passed. And so it evolved from Bruce Springsteen to how do I tell them that we've brought the best people on board? We use this 18 months to bring on like total bosses to the contract. We have the best staff or the best agency will do the best work for you. And that came up as a hashtag and it came to a tagline called Bosses for Boss. We put a little bit of orientation around, like what being a boss means? Right, we're innovative, we have, we're here to make an impact and help them orient their mission all of these really cool things, how to really ammonica around it. And the boss to me, besides Bruce Springsteen, the other one is Michael Scott. So if you're an office fan, that was where I was going, right, so like who are some of these social media or pop culture bosses that we could put in this campaign to have a little bit of fun with it and show people the type of people that we've recruited to work for resolutions? So we were thinking like, let me know, you know it's the office, all those sorts of things.

Alex Love :
4:17

And so when I brought this back to my team, I was, hey, let's put this like cute kind of video together. Right, like a very quick, we real, we can go to the agency's office, be in front of it, do a first day video. Right, let's have these fake pop star, cool pop stars walk in and say, oh, ready for day one. And that evolved into my team taking it and saying, hey, why don't we do an office parry video instead? And so, if you're a fan and you know the mean work, it's happening, right, that's the vibe we went for, because we'd waited so long for this contract to come out and protest that it was finally happening. We're finally getting to do the work. So we recruited people in our office. We had our CEO be Michael Scott, right, we got about best bosses mug.

Alex Love :
4:56

We did this really fun video and, as I said when I started, it really was intended to be something that we publish. Right, it was intended to be something that we use at a kickoff meeting with our partners on the contract to say, hey, thanks for sticking around for us. We know that this took forever, but we're really excited to get going. Here's a fun little video that we're just like we had some time. Let's put this out there. So we played this video at this internal kickoff meeting and everyone loved it and was like, hey, when can I reshare this? Like, when are we putting this out on social? And I was like we're not the government contractor, the office. We're making fun of it. Right, all in good fun, but this is definitely not part of our sort of campaign, right, this is something that we just wanted to do for fun, as a part of our internal culture, and everyone would know I love it. I love it. You have to put it out there. So we had a YOLO moment, right. It was one of those things where one the campaign itself was already pushing the boundaries, especially in the government contracting space, but very much in line with our culture at Reva. But we said, hey, let's post it. The CEO said post it. The SVP said post it. Okay, let's post it, let's see what happens.

Alex Love :
6:00

It was truly incredible to see how much positive feedback we got from that video. For months, people were coming up to me at industry events saying, hey, you guys are the ones that put out the Office Parity video. It was for a moniker for a while and it led to us winning an award. I got to speak at a conference about innovative marketing for government spaces. It was just one of those really cool things that took on our life of its own. It was supposed to be this really small moment in time at an internal meeting that turned into its own thing and it was definitely one of those things that was so out wild and out there, but absolutely hit to our audience, something that was memorable. What I think, as marketers, is what we're all trying to do. We're trying to create these campaigns that are memorable. We want people to know who we are, who our companies are, and that was probably one of the coolest campaigns I've ever put together by accident.

Eric Eden :
6:52

That's awesome on a number of levels. I think government contracting, as you've alluded to, is usually not the most innovative or creative place where you get to do this fun thing. You made government contracting not boring for sure. I think that's pretty great Then getting that response to it and then being able to be brave enough to share it out on social media and then get all that great feedback. That's pretty awesome. I did a similar parody video at a company that I worked with and we decided to parody my favorite Super Bowl commercial of all time called Terry Tate Office Linebacker. I don't know if you remember that commercial, but it was around early 2000s. We did a similar thing. It was the IPO enforcer was our version of it, but we basically had him going around the office and tackling people.

Alex Love :
7:51

Yes, I remember that one.

Eric Eden :
7:53

To make sure that people weren't saying anything that was outside of legal bounds before the company had their IPO. It was really a great internal video that we never got to share publicly. I think taking that step of sharing it publicly is pretty great. I think just a lot of government contracting it's, by design, not meant to have these sorts of creative moments, which is probably why you got such a great response to it.

Alex Love :
8:21

The cool thing is they started to see people parody in copies I think that's the biggest form of flattery.

Alex Love :
8:25

People take a look at your social media, your digital marketing and the marketing campaigns that you're putting out there and say, hey, they did it. I can too. Government marketing is what I call blue marketing. All of our logos are blue, everything's blue, it's all vanilla. As you said, there's a reason for that. It's a pretty serious industry, especially if you're in the DoD or the Intel space. Very serious missions, not a lot of room for creativity, but there is this pocket of hey. We're also people and we watch TV and we watch pop culture and we have things in common. At the end of the day, we're selling services, which means we're selling the people that are doing the work.

Alex Love :
9:00

One of our big campaigns, of things that we always try to push forward for, is the culture and the people that run solutions. Because, again, you want to like the people that you work with, whether or not they're your coworkers, your clients, what have you? Because you want to know hey, I trust this person. We're going to have a good time together. Putting a concept out like the office parody video right, the office is such an iconic show, so many people love it, so it really resonated with people that, hey, here's an agency, here's an organization, they're qualified to do the work right, they've got the past performance, they've got the. This means you can do the work, but they also have a little bit of fun. This is someone who stands out to me that I want to do work with, versus another big contractor who's been on site forever and maybe they have cool marketing and millions of dollars, but they don't have an office. Parody video.

Eric Eden :
9:45

I hope that your dog walks continue to inspire more creative marketing just along these lines, since dog walking is probably something you do every day. That's where I get a lot of my good inspiration, for I was telling you I have a French bulldog and I never shut up about my puppies. Those are fun times to get that sort of creative inspiration. But I understand that you also have a podcast that you host as well. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?

Alex Love :
10:13

I do. So we're in season one pilot season. It's called Mastering the Art of Sailing. One of my former business partners had his first child about six months ago and I just welcomed my first daughter six weeks ago Naturally, when we've got two first-time parents with lots of time. So he approached me how do you feel about podcasts? So yes, he said I had this great idea. There's now a lot of people in the marketplace talking about how critical failure is to success. It's usually thought of as a negative thing, but there's a lot that you can learn about failures and talking about it. What did you learn? How did you pivot, how did you reorient and then champion from there? So that's what Mastering the Art of Failure is about. It is bringing on entrepreneurs, athletes, people from all different sectors and industries to talk about one major failure that they had in their life, what they learned from it, how they pivoted and what they're doing now, so we can shed a positive light on the constant of failure in business and in life.

Eric Eden :
11:08

That's great. I encourage everyone to check that out. Alex, thanks for being with us today. Thanks for sharing your story and appreciate you being on the show Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.