Zoom is banking on a new global brand campaign, “Zoom Ahead,” to help the brand pivot from teleconferencing software to artificial intelligence-powered collaboration platform, per details shared with Marketing Dive. The effort launched last month on podcasts and with influencers, while a TV component is coming later this month and the effort will extend into next year.
Central to the effort is a 30-second ad, “I Use Zoom!,” that stars “Saturday Night Live” comedian Bowen Yang as a power-hungry IT manager who insists on a virtual meetings platform that requires a weird app and frustrates clients. Soon, cubicle-dwelling employees stand on their desks to proclaim their love of Zoom, starting a movement of Zoom users from other settings.
“This whole campaign is basically a love letter to our users, helping them stand up for the tools that they believe make their work easier. We wanted to find this intersection of heart, humor and product truth, which is really hard to do,” said Zoom CMO Kim Storin.
Written and produced by “SNL” star Colin Jost through his agency, No Notes, the ad will air as a national spot on Dec. 31 during the College Football Playoffs, with a regional pre-show buy for the Super Bowl to follow in top U.S. markets. The campaign will span digital, social and experiential channels through the spring, with the brand and agency already brainstorming where to take the creative next.
“We really view this as the jumping off point for a much broader 12- to 18-month campaign,” Storin said. “It will be a long-term investment in our brand.”
Marketing Dive spoke with the executive, who joined Zoom in April, about the brand’s strategy pivot, the misconceptions about “B-to-boring” marketing and how the brand is approaching media and measurement for the campaign.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: What kind of work goes into shifting perceptions of the brand?
KIM STORIN: That is a big challenge, and it is one of the things that we aim to accomplish with our brand campaign. It starts with the product truth, and that's what's really important. Our goal was to leverage the breadth and depth of our portfolio in a different way and share that message that this is not the Zoom that you might've known during the pandemic.
This is a pretty significant evolution that's occurred in terms of growing our product portfolio and ensuring that we capitalize on our core competency when it comes to video and ease of use, but bring that to different use cases and different buyers outside of the IT cohort: for the solopreneur that's working in a coffee shop or the marketing executive who's looking to create a pipeline or the customer support team that's dealing with escalations every single day from their customers.
The more that we can tell that story about being a complete AI-first workplace platform, the more that we can help change the perception, because we don't have an awareness problem, but we did have a perception challenge. We've seen that by anchoring on that product truth and then leveraging the marketing to tell that story drives more credibility than we would if marketing was just leading that without the strength of the platform behind it.
How are you shifting from a B2B mindset to more of a B2C one?
The misconception that B2B is “B-to-boring” is really a critical part of what we're trying to change. If you think about your business decisions, whether you're a solopreneur and it's your cash flow that's on the line, or you are the IT decision maker at a Fortune 50 company, business decisions are the most emotional decisions that you can make.
If I make a bad decision on a pair of shoes, all I have to deal with is my stepson making fun of me. If I make a bad decision on my IT platforms, my technology, my job is on the line, my cash flow's on the line, my ego is on the line.
Those product truths, those are emotional, and sometimes I think we forget as B2B marketers how much emotion comes into those choices, not just on the purchase, but also on the adoption. That’s what we're really trying to do with “Zoom Ahead” is make B2B more human and stop AI washing everything. AI should be embedded, not bolted on. That's a product statement and also a marketing statement — we're trying to find that intersection between that product truth and the marketing ambition.
What led you work with Colin Jost and No Notes on this campaign?
We wanted to tap into people that really get humor and are on the cutting edge of cultural relevance, because Zoom is so culturally relevant. Obviously the “SNL” team has to be on the tip of cultural relevance every single week, and it was such a great fit for us.
They take a unique approach in terms of coming at it with Colin's unique thinking and comedic brain, but they also wanted to understand what we were trying to achieve as a business. We anchored it in the business outcomes that we wanted to drive, but we gave them the freedom and the flexibility to really push us. Some things they wanted to push even more than than we necessarily did, but they pushed us to a good place.
It starts with having a leadership team and a board that understands what we're trying to accomplish with marketing. The board said to me, you have permission to be iconic. And so having that permission meant that I could go have that conversation with Colin and the team to say, how do we be iconic? What does that mean right now? What does that mean for Zoom? What does that mean in the market?
How do you measure brand building in an environment so focused on ROI?
Where the rubber meets the road is connecting our brand and the top of funnel efforts with the demand efforts. We're looking at this as a significant driver of revenue for our demand generation efforts, as well as share of voice and reach and all of that at the top.
I think the tremendous opportunity for us is really on [net annual recurring revenue]. It’s not just about acquiring new customers for us: it's about sparking the love of Zoom across prospects, but also our customers. I think that we will see impact and outcomes on the retention side and the expansion of share of wallet within our customer base.
We've put some pretty aggressive revenue targets on deck here. We're working hard to connect brand to demand, because that’s part of the challenge that marketers see when they have their performance marketing efforts that are living in a different silo than where the brand efforts are. We want it to feel like one contiguous strategy across the entire customer journey.
