Every IT manager knows the moment a colleague signs up for a new cloud tool without asking, and the moment it goes wrong. Most SaaS is now adopted by business users rather than IT teams, so companies gain speed and lose sight of where their data lives and what risks they’ve taken on.
Ampliphae’s founders saw this coming. As network engineers, they watched more and more of their industry’s operations move onto SaaS applications and realised companies were ill equipped to defend themselves in an outsourced world. Ampliphae helps organisations see and understand the cloud applications they rely on, so they can use them safely. Our job was to give busy IT and security leaders a reason to care before something went wrong.
We started with a Brandscape workshop with Ampliphae’s leadership team in 2021, part of support funded through the LORCA Ignite programme. It focused on two buyers. Bryan, an IT manager at a company of 300 or more people, is overwhelmed by risks that multiply as the business grows and scared of being blamed when something goes wrong. Seamus, a CIO, carries final responsibility for security and puts it plainly: the best he can hope for is for nothing to happen. For each of them we mapped the gains Ampliphae could create and the pains it could relieve.
From there we wrote the positioning: the only SaaS management dashboard that helps users become the first line of defence by revealing threats and helping them spot them. The brand promise was simpler still: we amplify organisational innovation by helping companies use third-party tools without fear. The voice came out calm, clear and authoritative, in the spirit of Carl Sagan: evidence-based, empathetic and straight to the point. We carried that thinking into the visuals, starting from Ampliphae’s own logo and colours.
Security brands tend to reach for the same literal iconography, and we wanted Ampliphae to stand apart from it. Starting from its existing purple and turquoise palette and the geometry of its logo, we built a set of 3D icons that turn its key messages into simple metaphors: the SaaS dilemma, discovery and penetration, privacy compliance, data governance, asset management, balance and the force multiplier.
For the Cloud Control campaign we drew the cloud in its most minimal form, a droplet. Rather than a rain drop, with its hint of bad weather, the droplet is rounded and friendly, with one sharp corner pointing up and to the right. Repeated as a parametric pattern, the droplets thin out from a dense cloud into clear space, a picture of the clarity Ampliphae brings.
The campaign was built around regulation. The PRA’s supervisory statement SS2/21 on outsourcing and third-party risk came into force for UK banks, insurers and other PRA-regulated firms on 31 March 2022, and it changed how those firms needed to manage the cloud apps their people were already using. Ampliphae had drafted an eBook on the subject. We restructured and edited it into Cloud Control: The Regulation Revolution, a 19-page report on the new landscape of SaaS risk management in financial services, and designed it in the new visual language.
We then wrote the campaign messaging and ad copy and designed a set of LinkedIn ads in two routes, Cloud Control and the 2022 SaaS Regulation Report, each inviting financial services firms to download the report.
Outfly, a London brand, marketing and product agency, ran Ampliphae’s Brandscape, wrote its positioning, brand promise and tone of voice, designed a set of 3D icons and the Cloud Control pattern, and created a regulation report and LinkedIn ad campaign for financial services.
Ampliphae is a SaaS management platform. It helps organisations see and understand the cloud applications they rely on, automating the discovery and assessment of the SaaS in use so they can manage the risk without slowing down innovation.
Speak to their pains and give them a reason to act now. For Ampliphae we mapped what IT managers and CIOs fear and want, then tied the campaign to a real deadline: new UK guidance on outsourcing and third-party risk for financial services firms.
“We amplify organisational innovation by helping companies use third-party tools without fear.” Outfly wrote it in the Brandscape, alongside a positioning built on helping users become the first line of defence against SaaS threats.
