CERTIFICATION MADE POSSIBLE

Rebooted

When IBM challenged experience marketing agency George P. Johnson to make IBM’s global sales meetings smarter, it resulted inmore thana tweak or two. The goal? To create ‘a new framework for the way human engagement should happen in the business-to-business world.’

BY BARBARA PALMER

How can you make a meeting smarter—not just by enhancing its content, but by making it more capable of helping participants solve problems? Two years ago, that’s what IBM, the world’s largest information-technology com- pany, was asking itself about the 8,000 sales meetings it holds around the world annually. The question followed naturally from IBM’s “Smarter

Planet” initiative, launched in 2008, which shifted the com- pany from being simply a provider of IT products and serv- ices to a kind of consulting partner to the world—a transformation that was born from the realization that while the globe is connected like never before, technology alone won’t solve its critical problems. “It’s obvious, when you consider the trajectories of development driving the planet

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today, that we’re going to have to run a lot smarter and more efficiently,” Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisanosaid in a speech about Smarter Planet to the Council on Foreign Rela- tions, “especially as we seek the next areas of investment to drive economic growth and to move large parts of the global economy out of recession.” Through the initiative, IBM would work collaboratively

with governments, academic institutions, and other corpora- tions to help create economic, social, and technology systems that take advantage of the vast amount of data and compu- tational power available to make the systems themselves more intelligent and efficient. By last year, Smarter Planet was “really hitting some marks,” according to Ben Roth, vice president of creative for George P. Johnson, the experi- ence marketing agency of record for IBM’s global events.

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