Discovering what’s missing.

Sometimes, the creative hook that turns prospects' heads is as simple as looking at how everyone else tells the story—and finding what’s missing.

In this case, countless vendors selling SD-WAN lead with incredibly similar diagrams that show how SD-WAN “works.” That diagram always shows the same thing—the SD-WAN service at the center (as if that service is a physical object) feeding lines out to branch locations, headquarters, and a data center. What the thing in the middle was actually supposed to be doing was always missing.

So, we started there. After interviewing SMEs, customers, and some good ol’-fashioned Googling, the basics were laid out. But, within those basics was something that was never mentioned. Something more than the magic of SD-WAN’s intelligent routing, bandwidth control, or ability to use connectivity options going unused. It was more—that each head ends’ on-the-fly compression is (in simple terms) zipping and unzipping data automatically, using less bandwidth to get more through those pipes without adding service cost.

A series of tubes.

Thinking back on internet memes from days long since past, the classic “the internet is a series of tubes” quote struck a chord. While not entirely accurate, it wasn’t entirely wrong either—and turns out was a really easy way to visualize something abstract into something easy for the techies and the folks in the c-suite alike to understand.

Leading with this visual breakdown of how the technology works, we developed a landing page that shows buyers on the fence about SD-WAN’s exact value—not in abstract vague terms, but in a hard, clear, and to-the-point story.

And that, in a crowded marketplace full of generalities, is a win.