Oracle Celebrating 25 years of innovations and innovators with Oracle

Establishing an industry leader's commitment to technology, as well as uniting, energizing and rebuilding trust with a legacy audience.

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Natural language processing that helps people communicate with AI assistants. IoT appliances that proactively schedule maintenance. Object detection that keeps driverless cars safe.

Around the world, enterprises are building trust with customers—through technology built on Java. Originally released in 1995 and acquired by Oracle in 2009, Java has been instrumental in shaping the way people engage with technology. So in 2020, with Java’s 25th anniversary approaching, Oracle reached out to develop a campaign that would celebrate its countless innovations and applaud the innovators who made them possible.

Beyond that, the campaign would help Oracle connect and build trust with generations of developers and enterprise IT professionals who’d built careers on Java—before and after the acquisition.

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The challenge

This meant we needed to acknowledge a few different pillars in the campaign messaging so that both sets of audience members felt heard and valued.

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The strategy

To create a sense of emotion, and action, we conducted persona-specific research around Java developers and IT executives who have propelled their careers on the success of Java. We leveraged Java’s key messaging tenets—Trust, Innovation and Predictability—to anchor all of our messaging, remaining consistent with the brand’s why statements and proof points.

Insight: Some of the developers we interviewed expressed that the relationship between Oracle and Java made them feel more confident in Java’s longevity.

Many units across Oracle wanted to co-promote the campaign along with the core Java team. To wrangle this, we wrote and designed a new landing page that housed a custom Java mascot “Duke”, who has been updated throughout the years and is open-source for anyone to create their own, a subtle nod to Java’s reach. Also, in this landing destination was a 25th birthday celebration to register to attend, a timeline of all of the highlights of Java over the past 25 years, and a video series featuring many prestigious developers who spoke about Java’s impact.

Knowing many teams across Oracle wanted in, we developed an internal campaign guide that included everything from voice attributes, narrative techniques, design guidelines, and even a call-to-action strategy.

This campaign has demonstrated the industry leader's recommitment to a technology that the development community has grown up with. It has also helped unite and energize a brand that had seen declining interest over the years, proving that with the right story and targeting you can rebuild trust.

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Key deliverables

  • Strategy & Positioning

  • Research & Messaging Strategy

  • Creative Development

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