Software companies don’t have an easy time marketing themselves to a mass audience, especially when the software is a complicated business product meant for cloud computing or data analytics.

Despite that hurdle, the business software company SAP will announce a new global advertising campaign this week called “Run Like Never Before” intended to reach not just high-level executives and I.T. managers, their usual customers, but small and midsize businesses, and maybe even a stray consumer.

“It is recognizing that I.T. isn’t the purchaser of all the products that we sell,” said Jonathan Becher, the chief marketing officer at SAP. The campaign was created by Ogilvy & Mather, part of WPP.



The ads are meant to highlight the speed with which SAP’s suite of technologies can help companies do business better. In the last few years, SAP has made a series of acquisitions to broaden its product base, including Sybase, which makes mobility and data management software, Business Objects, an analytics software company, and SuccessFactors, a cloud-computing company.

“We’re talking about some pretty abstract technologies,” said Chris Curry, creative director at Ogilvy & Mather. “Really what that translates to is getting new product out the door faster, allowing somebody to have a better work life,” he said.

The campaign will include television, print, mobile and digital ads that will begin in the United States, Brazil and Germany on Tuesday. The ads were shot in various locations around the world including China, India and South Africa.

The television spot starts with a grinding guitar riff and shows everything from fishermen pulling in their catch to a man in the back of a taxi typing on a tablet computer and a father checking his cellphone during his son’s cricket game. The messages on the screen say, “Run without warehouses,” “Run 10 years of numbers in seconds” and “Run without missing out.” “The imagery represents all the categories that SAP is involved in,” Mr. Curry said. “It’s not just people in offices.”

Visitors to Yankee Stadium in New York City on Friday got a preview of the TV ad, which was shown during the game. Print ads will run in magazines like the Harvard Business Review and The Economist.