Baan Plans $25m Ad Campaign to Boost International Profile.

Baan Co NV, the second-largest enterprise resource planning software vendor in Europe, is to unleash a $25m advertising campaign to put itself on the map globally and galvanize sluggish sales hit by the millennium bug date change. Netherlands-based Baan, is a virtual unknown outside Europe, CFO James F Mooney told financial news agency, Bloomberg, yesterday. Mooney said he had stepped into the marketing domain - rare for a CFO - because the firm's "products are under-leveraged and I need to correct that."

The advertising campaign will target the US, Asia and Latin America. Promotions planned for newspapers will play on the double "a" in the Baan name, imploring customers to "get aahead" or "aadapt" or be eaten.

The firm ascribed $9.2m losses in its second quarter ended June 30 to slowing sales as customers postponed software purchases to focus on ensuring that systems do not succumb to the millennium bug. Baan's ERP competitors Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP have also seen sales slow this year as large companies, which traditionally buy their industrial-strength business automation tools, batten down the hatches.

Mooney said that future advertising would also focus on the vendor's IBM-based software. Big Blue struck a deal in June to market Baan's products and work on integrating Baan's software with its hardware platforms.