Dan Collins oversees all advertising and corporate marketing for Corning Inc., a 160-year-old manufacturer of specialty glass used in telecommunications, consumer electronics, automotive and other industries.

“Corning is a technology company that invents and manufactures highly technical components that are often a keystone component of another company's consumer product,” Collins said. “You'll never see Corning's name on the finished product.”

In order to raise awareness of Corning as a brand and to drive sales of products manufactured with the company's glass, Collins oversaw the introduction of two successful campaigns this year.

The first was an integrated effort called “Gorilla Glass” for a new line of glass used in consumer electronics products. The campaign debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.

“We wanted to establish Gorilla Glass as a market standard for cover glass on handheld and IT products,” Collins said. “So we decided to go directly to the consumer—creating a consumer demand or pull for the product, which in turn would cause the electronics product manufacturers to specify Corning's Gorilla Glass.”

The “Gorilla Glass” campaign included print, online, out-of-home and mobile ads, featuring images of a gorilla abusing laptops, smartphones and other consumer electronics products.

Corning used social media including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to promote the campaign among tech-savvy audiences.

The second campaign, which broke in February, was an online video called “A Day Made of Glass,” designed to raise awareness of glass as an ingredient in manufacturing. The video showed futuristic applications of glass and was aimed at product designers and R&D professionals. It quickly became a viral hit, receiving more than 13 million views on YouTube.

—K.M.