Tony Hallett's After These Messages: This is the way Nortel returns to the grand campaign

Far from child's play, it's now about being "a sharp shooter", says CMO

Many of you will have felt Nortel's current marketing push. It's big, expensive, all-encompassing - but really quite different from its last big push way back around the turn of the millennium.

This time its hook is the nursery rhyme simplicity of 'This is the way… this is Nortel'. Whether on TV, billboards, magazines, the web or even every employee's email signature, the telecoms equipment vendor employs the first four words. A very sober report I received today even read: 'This is the way… We secure the total network for our clients… This is Nortel'.

See what I mean? Sober in that case but proof the tag is usable just about everywhere, just about.

Now compare what's going on - and crucially what it tells us - with the glitz at the height of the telecoms bubble.

I can remember vividly the previous 'Come Together' campaign. One well-run TV ad began with an executive (a high-powered CEO at a press conference, perhaps?) saying: "Here come old flat-top, He come grooving up slowly, He got joo-joo eyeball, He one holy roller…" and so on.

Confused? It's the opening few lines to the Beatles song playing the background that goes by the name of, you guessed it, Come Together. That was back when convergence was a big selling point for Nortel and many others dealing in communications kit. (The subject still is, in case you don't follow this sector.)

That campaign was huge, literally so at times, plastered on the side of buildings, hundreds of feet across. Then came the crash.

Nortel, as a company, is a now about a third of the size it was at its peak. It has had to shed tens of thousands of staff, as have a few key competitors.

The late 1990s push to build huge global fibre networks meant vendors couldn't satisfy demand fast enough. Then when that demand dried up, when no traffic came to fill most of the operators' pipes, a crash ensued.

Nowadays Nortel does well out of enterprise sales and its other main division sells to carriers, quite often mobile network operators. But optical networking is a shadow of its former self.

I recently caught up with Clent Richardson, Nortel chief marketing officer, and a man known for his expertise at brand leaders such as Apple and One2One, the UK mobile operator pre-takeover by T-Mobile.

'This is the way…' went through a classic big campaign process. The advertising agency, following a pitch process that involved a who's who of the industry, is Dallas-based Richards Group.

Richardson describes it as "simple, confident, aspirational and yet also humble - where Nortel needs to be right now". Despite having a 100-year pedigree and some great people and products, the vendor is still battling the aftermath of accounting irregularities and the loss of two CEOs in recent times - something the media, especially back home in Canada, is reluctant to forget.

"Now there has to be more alignment and focus," Richardson continues. "Back then [in the late 1990s] our ambitions were infinite. Now there is ruthless focus and we want to communicate effectively that we're here, alive and well and having gone through a profound transformation."

Many pundits would argue the job isn't done yet. The business is picking up but it's still relatively tough.

Will he tell me how much the campaign is costing? No. But there is one certainty - buying the right to use a Beatles song costs considerably more than turning to a nursery rhyme, which in this case is in the public domain.

However, he assures me, it's "not about the dollars you invest but the value you get out of the investment". He sees 'This is the way…' and variations on that theme - expect many - running for over a year, producing "an exceptional return".

Some would question the return of earlier campaigns. Arguably it was much harder to stand out in a crowded market, pushed by dot-coms and new channels, not least online and viral techniques.

There were allegations that, for what is almost entirely a B2B company, 'Come Together' ads were aimed at the public, to share buyers who might push up the Nortel market cap even further.

'This is the way…', despite again using mass media, is about (in Richardson's interpretation) "the CFO, the CEO, the CIO, prospective and existing customers, and [projecting] a halo into partners and suppliers".

The editor of one leading publication dedicated to marketing tells me that every three to four years we can expect such a push from such a player.

"It's important they reach not just the IT directors but the CEOs and MDs and even reach beyond these people," he says.

Rewind four or five years and Nortel's CMO, who has been at the company just seven months, says there were "virtually unlimited [marketing] budgets but they didn't think of targets, it was a shotgun approach. Now we have to be sharp shooters".

Just how effective 'This is the way…' ends up, we don't yet know. The audio-visual ads end with what's called a sonic mark. Consumer packaged goods marketers - and famously Intel - have employed such a trick for some time. Who knows if we'll remember or even notice Nortel's.

For now, many people will be glad the company is back and shouting about what it does. It's another sign of recovery.