Corporate Work
In the late 1980s, Penn was the force behind his firm's drive to win corporate consulting clients. Texaco, which was experiencing image problems due to bankruptcy at the time, was the firm's first major corporate client.
In 1993, Penn, Schoen & Berland was engaged by AT&T's new advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding to guide a response to MCI's "Friends and Family" plan, an upstart competitor for AT&T's long distance services. To help AT&T understand how best to counter MCI's strongest messages, Penn created the ‘mall testing’ methodology for competitive advertising research. In the ‘mall tests,’ Penn showed randomly selected mall shoppers MCI ads head-to-head with proposed new AT&T ads. Using this methodology, Penn's firm determined messages resulting in AT&T's "True" plan and its $200 million advertising campaign. As a result of this campaign, by the end of 1994, AT&T had signed up 14 million new long-distance customers.
Penn has served as a key strategic advisor to Bill Gates and Microsoft since the mid-1990s. Penn began working with Microsoft when the company faced antitrust litigation initiated by the U.S. Justice Department. Penn also created the famous "blue sweater" advertisement that featured Bill Gates and was instrumental in reclaiming the company's reputation. In 2006, a survey of global opinion leaders found that Microsoft was the world's most-trusted company, a development which The Wall Street Journal partially attributed to Penn's advice.
His other corporate clients have included Ford Motor Company, Merck & Co., Verizon, BP, and McDonald's.
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