January 2006 A good rap song is hard to resist. Just ask the employees at SAP who helped spread a customized rap song to more than 85 percent of their colleagues. The rap song, written and produced by Morsekode, was the cornerstone of a viral marketing campaign that was honored this month by MarketingSherpa, Inc. as the favorite among the top 12 viral marketing campaigns of the year.

The campaign was developed by Morsekode to raise awareness for the agency's creative work for SAP and to generate sales leads within the organization. Built around a rap song titled "The ERP of This Century" (ERP stands for "Enterprise Resource Planning"), the campaign was intended to spread via e-mail forwarding, blogs and internal postings throughout SAP.

"We wanted to show SAP our expertise in the technology sector as well as our specific in-depth knowledge of SAP," commented agency principal, Mark Morse. "Our campaign met both objectives. When we call SAP today everyone has heard of us and our calls are returned – even at the senior levels. That's exactly what we needed."

According to Morse, the URL to the rap song was originally sent to 20 people within SAP. The e-mail did not include a forwarding request. However, within the first month the song was played more than 14,000 times and to this day is played thousands of times each month. In addition, it has been posted on blogs all over the world, on internal SAP discussion boards, and has even been used for internal meetings at SAP locations around the world.

Lyric here...

MarketingSherpa Summary:

Brilliant! This viral campaign should inspire every marketer targeting huge organizations such as the Fortune 1000 and Global 1000. When your business prospect has tens of thousands of employees around the world, how can you get them all talking about how wonderful you are? How do you turn a handful of internal evangelists into thousands praising your name? Turns out rap music has all the answers…

Agency: in-house
Client/company: Morsekode
Brand campaign was conducted for: Morsekode
Launch date of campaign: May 6, 2005
Target audience/demographic: SAP Employees (especially in marketing)

Campaign Goal:
Increase exposure of our small marketing agency within one of the largest software companies in the world - SAP. We had done some work and wanted to capture their attention to make additional projects more plausible. To make ourselves stand out to SAP.