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To Make The Cloud Relatable, Rackspace Focuses on a Story [VIDEO]

This guest post is an inside look at Rackspace’s content campaign by one of the brand’s content marketers. 

One of the more difficult things about working in the marketing department of a technology company is that we often overlook the story and focus too much on the bits and bytes. This is a particular challenge for me: I left the familiar world of technical project management ten months ago for a new challenge as a content marketer.

Recently, Rackspace opened its cloud technology to developers all over the world. The open cloud introduces choice, freedom, collaboration and rapid innovation. This is a message we wanted everyone to hear, not just technologists. However, we were presented with a unique challenge: How do we explain the magnitude of this shift to people who have limited knowledge of what the cloud is? Our team realized that it needed to tell a story instead of touting the 1s and 0s of our solution.

Our inspiration came from the Chipotle commercial, “Back to the Start,” that aired during the 2012 Grammy award show.  The animated video follows a farmer and illustrates how free range ranching evolved into an era where cows and pigs were penned, pumped with hormones and overly processed. Ultimately, the farmer decides to get back to the start and frees the animals out from the confined spaces and allows them to roam in the open. The video wasn’t just about selling burritos; it was about what Chipotle as a company believes in.

That got us thinking; instead of directly promoting our products and talking about throughput, bandwidth, API capabilities or networking, we should focus on a story of one very proud dad to show the importance of the open cloud. It was certainly something never done before at Rackspace.

The human condition to create, preserve and share has existed since the beginning of time, but the ways in which we share have evolved. Early on we communicated with cave drawings, but it was difficult for others to see them if they were far away. The printing press came around, but you had to have access to the physical book to get the knowledge. Much later cloud computing happened, and knowledge was transferred at a blistering pace and available everywhere. However, the applications that developers worked so hard to create were not easily portable with the proprietary cloud-hosting providers. Developers became locked in with that one vendor. Rackspace has changed all this, creating an open cloud and overcoming this latest problem that humans face: creating and sharing.

Juxtaposing the difficulties of sharing a painting in cave and a photo from a book with that of the closed cloud helped us show how big of a revolution the open cloud is for human history. Simple, emotional and shareable, the video is effective in explaining the role of Rackspace and the open cloud to a general audience as opposed to slinging technical jargon at them. Rackspace has changed the technological landscape, spurring human creativity and innovation. The power of this shift is best told through the eyes of a cave-dad than that of simply bits and bytes.

Contently is proud to count Rackspace among its customers.

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