Hoping to reach non-techie executives while injecting a little of bit of hipness into the painfully gray realm of data storage, EMC has assigned its North American ad account to Boston-based Arnold Advertising.

Arnold, of course, has drawn attention lately for its slick Volkswagen spots featuring Generation Xers, smelly furniture and backyard barbecue scenes.

The EMC account is valued at between $10 million and $15 million and will include print and television. EMC is also considering giving Arnold its international advertising, which accounts for another $5 million to $10 million.

EMC's chief executive officer, Michael C. Ruettgers, said Arnold will be charged with broadening the company's appeal among young Internet types.

EMC has relied on old-line banks, insurance companies andother traditional firms to build itself into a storage vendor with annual sales of $5 billion. But nowadays, fast-growing Internet firms, many run by young professionals, need large storage devices to hold ever-expanding amounts of data.

EMC is replacing Mullen, a Wenham, Massachusetts, agency that has served up EMC ads since 1994. Arnold beat out True North Communications' Bozell Worldwide and Omnicom Group's Doremus, both of New York, in gaining the account.

The winning agency is still a little short on details about how it intends to reach Internet hipsters with EMC's message. But Arnold said it wants to broaden EMC's reach beyond just people fluent in the jargon of data storage, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and data warehousing (putting it somewhere).

Not many business executives "get that language," said Ed Eskandarian, chief executive officer of Arnold, a unit of Snyder Communications Inc.

Far too many executives are experiencing anxiety because of information overload, said EMC.The ads will try to "tap into that emotion that these businesspeople feel," said Ronald M. Slate, vice-president of global communications at EMC, based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

Under Mullen, EMC has focused on print ads, mainly in Business Week, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. This year, Mullen designed a new campaign around the "EMC Effect," which focused on explaining how storage could help companies run more effectively.

One of the objectives of Arnold's campaign will be to inject more of a human element into selling storage devices, but it is still too early to speculate about what forms the ads might take, said Slate. EMC considered some humorous spots during the account pitch, but plans to stay away from tongue-and-cheek for the time being, said Ruettgers.

Eskandarian said one way to expand EMC's audience from chief technical officers to chief executive officers is to increase EMC's television exposure during major gold tournaments. Also, Eskandarian said new ad venuesmightinclude golf magazines, as well as TV spots on financial news networks such as CNBC and CNN.

The Asian Wall Street Journal