IBM: $50M in signings and a studio built from scratch

The brief

IBM’s consulting practice sells some of the most complex offerings on earth - multi-year transformations, hybrid cloud migrations, AI programs - to the most skeptical buyers on earth. For five years, my job was to make that complexity land: with clients like AT&T, with C-suite stakeholders, and with the market.

I operated in a hybrid role the org didn’t have a box for: senior consultant in the strategy room, producer on the shoot, creative director over the deliverable. That combination - strategy fluency plus production capability - became the engine for everything that followed.

The campaigns

The core of the work was go-to-market and digital campaigns for enterprise consulting clients. The flagship: AT&T. Campaign systems - positioning, digital experiences, film, sales materials - that carried IBM’s offerings into one of its most important accounts and kept them there.

The numbers held up in the most conservative measurement culture there is: $50M in signings directly attributed to campaigns I drove, contributing to more than $200M in downstream revenue.

The craft was translation. Enterprise consulting campaigns fail when they lead with capability inventories. Ours led with the client’s problem, dramatized what change looked like, and made the consultants themselves - the actual product - visible and credible on camera. Producing for consultants and sales teams became a discipline of its own: coaching subject-matter experts into on-camera storytellers, building sales-enablement film libraries the field teams actually used, and packaging offerings so a seller could open a deal with them.

IV Creative Studio

Midway through, I stopped renting creative capability and built it. IV Creative Studio was an internal creative team I founded and ran inside the consulting practice - designers, web developers, copywriters, and marketers I recruited, mentored, and directed.

The studio changed the practice’s economics and its polish at once: pitch materials, campaign assets, and digital experiences produced in-house, faster and cheaper than agencies, by people who understood the offerings. Just as important, it standardized how the practice pitched and packaged its work - one design language, one narrative system, instead of a hundred partners’ personal PowerPoint styles.

The innovation lab

The same build-it instinct produced an enterprise digital innovation lab for VR, AR, and XR. When you’re selling invisible things - architectures, transformations, operating models - immersion is persuasion: we built experiences that let executives walk through the thing they were buying. The lab became a differentiator in pursuits and a sandbox for what enterprise storytelling could be.

Results

• $50M in signings generated; $200M+ in downstream revenue influenced
• IV Creative Studio founded, staffed, and operationalized - a permanent internal capability
• Enterprise VR/AR/XR innovation lab launched
• A five-year masterclass in C-suite communication, sales enablement, and making the complex sellable

A library of campaign films and sales-enablement work from this era is being added to this page.