A Behind the Scenes Look at the New Axonius Film with Simone Biles - Controlling Complexity: Growth

Today we released the final installment of the Axonius film series with Simone Biles, Controlling Complexity: Growth. This post looks at why we did it, how we evaluated whether it was successful, and what we learned from a 2 year adventure.

Starting at the End: Today's Launch

Today we're launching the final chapter in our 3 part series with Simone Biles. You can see Controlling Complexity: Growth here.

What Were We Trying to Accomplish with the Controlling Complexity Campaign?

In a word: awareness. When we first started Axonius, we knew that the larger the organization, the more acute the pain they felt around knowing what assets they had, uncovering risk, and automating action. But a few years after launching the first cybersecurity asset management solution, we noticed that smaller organizations were feeling the exact same pain.

But as a young company, we didn't have the brand awareness for the masses. In fact, when we did our first aided recall survey only 9% knew who we were. In other words, 91% of our target audience didn't know Axonius existed.

Which led us to do two things:

1 Creating a simple theme to describe our value.

We could talk about cybersecurity asset management, becoming the system of record for digital infrastructure, and all of the amazing product features we have. But we needed a big theme to hang those from. We needed that big, lofty idea to concisely tease the aspirational value.

Q: What is the thing that Axonius customers get when they buy our product(s)?

A: They are able to control complexity.

Complexity is inevitable. It's the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and it's true in our everyday lives. Over time, things get more complex. And that's what we see at organizations we work with. They add more people, more devices, SaaS applications, cloud instances, and tools to manage and secure them all.

This fragmentation is what leads to many of the IT and security challenges organizations face today. But if they were able to collect, aggregate, and correlate data from all of the sources that know about assets, they would be able to know what they have, uncover risk, and decide what to do when any asset deviates from their expectations.

In short: we help organizations control the inevitable complexity they will face as they grow.

2. Figuring out how to tell the story

Great. We have a theme that fits. Now what? Well now we needed to figure out how to tell that story.

Cybersecurity vendors (and tech in general) tend to rely on talking about military-grade features, real-time detection, and lead with FUD. They rarely focus on the people behind the software and hardware. The hacker behind the hoodie.

We wanted to focus on the human beings that know working in cybersecurity isn't a fair fight, but they show up every day anyway.

We wanted to find a public figure that represented the idea behind the campaign. Someone that faced adversity and came out stronger on the other side. Someone that could adapt. Someone that is constantly striving for growth.

I kept coming back to one name: Simone Biles. Arguably the greatest American athlete of all time, she grew up as a foster kid, and the entire world watched her at the Tokyo Olympics. Imagine competing at the highest level under a worldwide microscope. But Simone is one of the most marketable athletes on earth. Why would she choose to work with a cybersecurity company?

You don't get what you don't ask for. So we asked.

Meantime, we saw that a video of Amy Bream, a Crossfit athlete born with one leg was going viral. In the video, she's seen trying to lift a very heavy weight, and fails. She tries again, fails. Tears stream down her face. But she does it again and this time, she nails it. In that video, without any words whatsoever, it encapsulated the spirit of the campaign.

So we reached out to Amy, too.

What happened next is truly unbelievable. They both said yes. And in what I will refer to as the "dog that caught the car" scenario, we had to figure out what to do next. What happens to the Marketing team that got what they wished for?

What Do These Two Athletes Have to Do with Cybersecurity?

As Chris Cochran and Ron Eddings so perfectly say:

Cybersecurity professionals are mental athletes with no off-season.?

From an Inc. article covering the initial campaign launch:

Still, it invites the question, what does a cybersecurity asset management firm aiming to humanize the field have in common with a gymnastics star, even if that star has been hacked?

Despite the unusual?pairing, the answer's pretty simple: resilience.?

"Throughout our lives, we'll all share adversity and complexity over the course," Biles tells Inc. "And the ability to persevere through that is what really makes a strong system."

"We both share complexity," Biles adds. "Even if it's in our own different worlds, we both go through it."

and:

Biles isn't the only athlete to connect to Axonius's campaign. The CrossFit champion Amy Bream, who was born without a right leg, is also involved. Along with Biles, the two will discuss how they each take on complexity in their lives in a video series that's housed on?an Axonius video platform. They will also make appearances on podcasts and in-person events.

Chapter One: How Amy and Simone Control Complexity

Our first video with Amy Bream looked at how she focuses on what she can control to overcome adversity.

Followed by the first commercial with Simone Biles

Chapter Two: Adaptation

In the second installment, we wanted to highlight how in the face of enormous complexity, the best not only find ways to adapt to the challenge, they also find ways to give back.

Giving back is core to what we do at Axonius. In this chapter, we were fortunate enough to be able to give to Friends of the Children - an organization that provides professional mentors to kids in foster care - and the Morgan family. I don't want to spoil it. You'll have to watch:

Chapter Three: Growth

And now, back to today. We started with the fundamentals of dealing with complexity. We then looked at adapting to challenges. In the final chapter, we finish with the idea that complexity is inevitable, but growth is optional.

To do this, we wanted to bring in people that work in and adjacent to cybersecurity to tell their stories through the vehicle of a letter written to their younger selves. We then had an informal conversation to explore the common threads between a champion athlete and cybersecurity professionals:

Oritse Justin Uku, CISSP is an author, veteran, and Business Information Security Officer. I met him years ago at an event in NYC and stayed in touch. His journey from business school to Afghanistan, finance to cybersecurity is fascinating, and I've always thought him to be one of the most inspiring people I know.

Tiffanie Joseph, PSM1 took the leap to put herself through a yearlong cybersecurity program to improve her and her daughter's life. Her story is evidence that cybersecurity can transform people's lives.

John Seaman helped us convince Simone to work with us in the first place. John and his family have been?involved in orphan care (adopting & fostering), he's a long-distance runner, and his motto is to leave people, places, and things better than you found them. A truly great human being.

Promoting the Growth Chapter: Letter Writing Campaign

As part of today's launch, Dean Sysman wrote his own letter to his younger self:

We're encouraging people to write their own letters to themselves about a time when you overcame complexities?of your own.

Use hashtag?#DearYoungerMe?and please tag Nathan Burke , Dean Sysman and Axonius in your post so we can read your stories!

Was It Successful? How Do We Know?

People often say that measuring brand is impossible. You just know the absence of it. I disagree.

Though not perfect, I evaluate brand investment in two ways:

1. Aided Recall - If you made it this far, you may remember that at the outset of the campaign we were at 9% aided. 18 months later (before today's launch) we are now at 27% aided recall. That is a historic leap in such a short time.
2. Customer and Employee Stories - We are constantly hearing from customers and Axonius employees that they only found out about us because they saw the Simone and Amy content.

I won't give any numbers here, but I can confidently say that the investment has been well worth it by any measure.

Time to Thank People

Working with Simone, Amy, and everyone involved with this campaign was truly a career highlight for me. I need to thank many people, and I apologize for anyone I've missed.

Kaite Rosa , Karen Dorfzaun , Elizabeth Hartel , Madeleine King , Jeffrey Schleicher , Allen K. and Sky Pak - You transformed a high-level idea into something amazing that you should all be proud of. You accomplished something that is beyond all expectation.

Dean Sysman - You let us run with a crazy idea that no one has ever done before. Thank you.

Stephanie F. , Micheal B. , Jennifer Lynch , Austin Holcomb for all the work behind the scenes on the website and social channels to get this out the door.

Tracey Workman for convincing journalists that this wasn't a run-of-the-mill vendor stunt, but a story worth telling.

To our great agency partners Stept Studios for producing and editing the final chapter in the series, and to Ruckus for the first two chapters.

To Janey Miller , Drew Johnson and the Octagon team for taking a chance on a cybersecurity company who wanted to do something ambitious.

To Genevieve Jewell Thompson and the Amy Bream team - thank you so much for being a joy to work with.

To Oritse Justin Uku, CISSP , Tiffanie Joseph, PSM1 , John Seaman - thank you for letting us tell your stories.

To the entire Axonius team, thank you for supporting this project. I am so proud of the work we've done and can't wait to hear what people think.