Corporate Image: Security Sells

Some companies are so serious about security, they try to make it part of their corporate image

The television advertising spots were named 2003's advertising campaign of the year by Adweek magazine, and also won an Emmy. "The person you see on screen and the voice you hear are very disconnected, as are the topics being discussed," says David Sigel, group account director at Fallon Worldwide of Minneapolis, which dreamed up the ads. "It's very funnybut very vividly brings identity theft to life."

At Citi, Burns concedes that it's difficult to determine the number of new customers the service has brought the bank. "In terms of fraud detection, our customer satisfaction ratings are extremely high, and amazingly high in terms of the identity theft solutionwhich is usually a good leading indicator of new business," she says.Microsoft Aims for TrustworthinessCuriously, one of the biggest developments in Microsoft's historyand certainly one that is intended to have an enormous impact on its customersisn't being marketed yet. Or at least not in the direct manner that Citigroup is using.

While Microsoft does actively promote some security-related products (including through advertisements in CSO), "Trustworthy Computing," as the company christens it, deliberately isn't mentioned in the company's advertising. "There is no advertising around Trustworthy Computing at all," insists Microsoft spokeswoman Nicole Miller. "As far as I can recall, there hasn't been a single press release on the subject." The company does, of course, provide a website that explains the initiative, and a quick Google search will turn up plenty of Microsoft quotes discussing the initiative in the media. The initiative stems from Chairman Bill Gates' well-publicized leaked edict to Microsoft's 50,000 employees in January 2002. After a turbulent period during which security loophole after security loophole was found in the company's products, Gates was forced to recognize the adverse impact on Microsoft's reputation. From here on, he insisted, security was job number one. "Flaws in a single Microsoft product...not only affect the quality of our platform and services overall, but also our customers' view of us as a company," Gates wrote. "We can and must do better."

But how much better? Well, Gates pointed to the local phone company as the role model: Security should be as reliable as the telephone system's dial tone. But to Gates, customers' perceptions of Microsoft were far from allowing the company to include itself in the same category. A long-term mission, dubbed the Trustworthy Computing Initiative, was henceforth under way to redeem Microsoft's brand and image in the eyes of its customers.