Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to the Revenue Rebels podcast, hosted by Alan Zhao, Co-Founder of Warmly.ai.
We feature B2B SaaS revenue leaders who have challenged traditional methods to achieve remarkable results.
In each episode we cut through the fluff and dive deep into modern tactics used to achieve success: intent-based outreach, social selling, B2B Netflix, video marketing, warm calling, customer led sales, influencer marketing and more.
On the show you can expect episodes with those who create demand - marketing experts, partnerships gurus and social media superstars and those who capture demand - outbound and inbound sales experts, leaders, and practitioners.
Our goal is to shine a light on modern, effective and unique revenue generating methods and equip you with the insights you need to unlock your next strategic advantage.
We're huge proponents of signal-based selling and signal-based, data-driven B2B go-to-market as a whole. Ask us what "Autonomous Revenue Orchestration" means and we'll be more than happy to shine a light on our vision of what the field of B2B revenue will become.
For more content, check out our YouTube page and LinkedIn newsletter!
Melissa Rossenthal: [00:00:00] I saw like this hard selling that this wasn't done in the way that actually grabbed attention and never differentiated products from one another. You could look at one to the next and they all solve for the same thing. So when thinking about how to build that brand, the thought process was what is going to make us stand out and unique in the second most crowded market next to CRM?
Melissa Rossenthal: How do we align our tonality and our personality with all of these different channels? So between all of these different assets, it's like what is the, like the throughput and the thread that connects all of them together. And it was humor mirrored more of an SNL skit than it did a traditional advertisement.
Melissa Rossenthal: So it was this like comedic take on it. It's really hard to, even if you hate polarizing ads, like competitive ads like that, it's hard to hate this because it's just so funny and well done.
Alan Zhao: Welcome to the Revenue Rebels podcast, brought to you by warmly. On this show, we cut straight through the fluff and dive deep into the specific tactics that B2B revenue leaders across sales and marketing are using to find success in today's environment.
Alan Zhao: I'm your host, Alan Zhao. And the reason for that is because you already had the production [00:01:00] team. Something of that production quality has got to be at least like 15, 000 to 20, 000 if you were to go with an agency.
Melissa Rossenthal: Yeah. Yeah. So knowing that, like, that was sort of the vision into the future. It's like, if we're going to be creating always on campaigns and constantly creating new assets, you know, are we going to spend 50, 000 to 100, 000 a piece?
Melissa Rossenthal: That makes zero sense, especially if you're going to scale. Um, your production, if you're going to scale your ad creation. So, you know, being able to create hundreds of ads for 2, 000 a piece, you know, uh, our bill is 500k, where first it would be a couple million to work with an agency, but where they're paid on retainer, and you're paying them hourly for, for delivery, you know, for deliverables and work that you may not even use.
Melissa Rossenthal: It just doesn't make sense. Um, so yeah, I mean, you know, that that's the bet that we took that eventually paid off, especially within the ability to do it efficiently at the scale and also create really unique stuff that I just don't think we would have been able to do if we didn't do it in house.
Alan Zhao: Can we talk about the ROI of that?
Alan Zhao: Is there any kind of quantitative metrics we can point back to for a 2, 000 investment?
Melissa Rossenthal: I mean, yeah, [00:02:00] yeah, I would say like, even the, the deals that specifically pointed to that ad, As a reason why we were being evaluated was, you know, half a million to a million just in pipeline on that outside of the, you know, the attribution that they were able to track back to you on YouTube and open team.
Melissa Rossenthal: So, I mean, you know, we made sure that, um, within the CM on the CMS that like CMS CRM that we had everyone that was in our sales team and be able to track the ads back if they were mentioned, if they were referenced. Um, in any sort of conversation and we saw it a million times. I mean, some of the ads and some of the reasons like, oh, we saw the JIRA ad, like we even hired people based on that ad from Atlassian, which is really awesome.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, it was apparently went viral at the company and a couple of people emailed us and said, Oh, I kind of want to work for this company. So, um, yeah, our best product marketer, we hired from Atlassian because of that ad. So it definitely paid itself in dividends in terms of deal size pipeline, and then also internal hires.
Melissa Rossenthal: And we were able to make off of that for 2K. [00:03:00]
Alan Zhao: Oh my gosh. The damage that was done to your competitors and overall boost of the business goes far beyond even some pipeline produced.
Melissa Rossenthal: Yeah, yeah, and you know the other the other so like, you know, we were on a uh, kind of a kick with that and um You know, I think at last he was a little upset with us and they did this thing Um, which I can't believe they did but um at their conference about two months later.
Melissa Rossenthal: They um They called us out on stage their chief product officer called us out on stage and he Referenced a lot of our billboards and he made fun of them and he stated our tagline over and over and over again You Um and being the buzzfeed brain that our team was we said well, what we're gonna create a remix out of this So we took all of his speaking points and we put us created a song in real time And we put the song behind it and we remixed his speech into an ad for click up And then we got that up and running in an hour And by the time people were leaving the conference, we were flooding their feeds with this ad of their chief product [00:04:00] officer effectively creating an advertisement for us.
Melissa Rossenthal: And, um, and we had our entire team share it out separately on LinkedIn so that if one person got a cease and desist order, um, it would, it wouldn't affect the entire team. Uh, in the entire push. So one person got it. Um, and they weren't able to make us take it down. But, um, yeah, you know, it's like that was free.
Melissa Rossenthal: Uh, you know, that took an hour of time to do. And, uh, it was, it was really effective. I got a ton of emails from people at Atlassian and they were like, please don't say that. Please don't tell anyone that I sent you this email, but that was amazing. You know, I think they appreciated it too. It was really hard not to laugh.
Alan Zhao: If this is what happens when you bring a troll team over into B2B SaaS, a very serious industry, then magic can happen like this. I wanted to Yeah,
Melissa Rossenthal: you just have to have the, you have to have the, uh, it's the way of thinking, you know? Like, it's, it's so embedded in, in the team that we created. The way that we were able to just, you know, reflex onto things that were happening in culture and newsjack.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, you know, we, we then went on to do a ton of campaigns on, on AI and newsjacking. Um, but [00:05:00] you know, that's the mentality and I think you can't buy that, that like way of thinking, you know, you have to build it.
Alan Zhao: I want to dive into that question next. There's this new app. I think it's, uh, it basically creates music for you and then you give it like a prompt and it'll create a song.
Alan Zhao: So that tactic can actually be used by a lot of people very readily these days. Fascinating. We were thinking about this as well. So given We're talking about creating viral content. How do you think about creating content that can expand, reach and go viral? And how do you like for this video, for example, how, what's your way of getting it in the, in the hands of as many people as possible?
Melissa Rossenthal: Yeah. I mean, you know, for. a company that has, we had 1200 employees that are all equally invested. They love your brand marketing. They feel like they're along for the ride. Um, you know, you're, you're hiring, you know, and this matters a lot, but you're hiring a lot of people that are brought in by your marketing.
Melissa Rossenthal: If you're very out there with your brand, you know, people are coming in because they want to work for that brand. Um, of [00:06:00] course they love the they think the product is great, but they want to work for that brand. It's always the fact that like brands are cool. You want to work at a place because they have a great brand Um, and they brand authority.
Melissa Rossenthal: So a lot of the people that we brought in love the brand already Um, we're eager to help and shape it and they loved everything we were producing So we'd often have the entire company share something out and when you think about the expansive networks of people within our within our 1200 person organization who come from you know, You know those the atlassians who come from the mondays who come from all of the our competitors or some of you know the biggest sas companies, um on the market or in private markets, um, The manpower that we had that was able to boost kind of a collective virality even Outside of paid channels was pretty remarkable.
Melissa Rossenthal: So, um, you know, it was a part of our strategy was whenever we would create something We would have all of our employees share it Um on this in on their social channels, um, and that was one way of creating virality But you know a lot of the the videos were so viral inherently and just the way that they were That what we found was a lot of [00:07:00] people were ripping them up of youtube Um from the paid ad and actually creating sub channels and hosting them on those channels and so So one day I did a search for one of our Jira ads and I saw like five other channels that were hosting it where it had hundreds of thousands of views and I'm like, Oh, we're not baking this into the into the reach or organic, you know, tracking of this ad, it's like, we're looking at less such attribution on our paid ad, but we're not looking at the hundreds of thousands of views it has organically.
Melissa Rossenthal: So. You know, there's a lot of ways that, like, if you're creating something that has the potential to go viral, it's going viral in many ways. We'd see the ad circulating on Reddit. We'd see the ad in other places on, on the internet. So, you know, you can kind of feel the virality when it's in different pockets.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, it's being spoken about. Especially if you're targeting developers, and everywhere developers are, they're talking about this ad. You know, that's, that's sort of when you know. You can have mainstream virality, which, and then niche virality.
Alan Zhao: Got it. I mean, it probably comes down to very high quality content as well.
Alan Zhao: Um, but sounds like Sharon social, do you [00:08:00] paint ads? Get it. That's going to be like the, um, the genesis of it. And then it kind of snowballs from there, depending on how viral the content actually is. It'll be shared and cross shared and posted to communities. Yeah,
Melissa Rossenthal: the content has to be, it has to be good. I mean, that's really like, you can do whatever you want and create an entire holistic campaign that involves influencers and, and every muscle you have.
Melissa Rossenthal: But if the content in itself doesn't have the ability to go viral on its own, because of how, you How outlandish it is, how crazy it is, differentiated it is, then it won't work anyway. Um, so it really does come down to the message, the content, how it's presented, um, how creative you can be.
Alan Zhao: Last question, any advice on people, uh, if they wanted to create viral content that's quality?
Melissa Rossenthal: Definitely, um, I would say, um, Things are getting cheaper, and it's, it's cheaper now to be able to create something really high quality. Um, if you can, invest in a small production team to start, and be able to prove that model out, and then eventually you'll be able to scale it. [00:09:00] But, you know, the biggest inspiration for us when we were thinking of ideas, too, was, was a lot of um, newsjacking.
Melissa Rossenthal: Like, thinking about what our ICPs were talking about, what the pain points were, what they were frustrated with, what we were seeing coming up in the news, that we could both take advantage of the timeliness of it, Because everyone was talking about it, and then also could relate it back to different ICPs through versioning.
Melissa Rossenthal: So, you know, the frustration of, of meetings, how many meetings we're in, how, how much those meetings cost. We saw a study come out, um, about like the average of cost per meeting. And then we created this very humorous video about, um, Be the types of people in these meetings and how much money would cost per person in the meeting holistically.
Melissa Rossenthal: And that kind of went viral on its own, too. So thinking about, like, what's relevant to your target buyers that can also touch on timeliness that can also potentially go viral. And then you kind of have this trifecta of more ammo. You're talking about something that's already being talked about, but sort of puts you in another [00:10:00] bucket already.
Melissa Rossenthal: And then if it's a pain point to millions of people, Like puts you in that kind of second caliber. And if the content is really great, then, you know, obviously it has the ability to be amplified too. It's the
Alan Zhao: perfect storm. It sounds so easy, but there's so many things happening here that becomes by second nature for you guys, but it is fantastic learning about this stuff.
Alan Zhao: I learned a lot. I'm going to be using some of these strategies for the videos that we create. I'm sure our viewers will too. How can people find out more about you? Oh
Melissa Rossenthal: yeah. Uh, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find. And I, uh, I love meeting new people and connecting on ideas. So find me on LinkedIn.
Alan Zhao: Awesome. Please connect with Melissa on LinkedIn and then check out ClickUp's content. I think you guys are going to get a lot out of it. Thank you so much.
Melissa Rossenthal: Thanks for having me.
Alan Zhao: If you're a fan of the Revenue Rebels podcast, please leave us a review on Spotify and Apple podcast. Your support goes a long way in helping us bring on more amazing guests.
Alan Zhao: Thank you. All right. Excited to have Melissa Rosenthal on the show today. She is the CMO at Insight Timer and former chief creative officer at ClickUp where she grew revenue from [00:11:00] zero to six million in five years using unconventional B2B playbooks and being hyper focused on building a best in class brand.
Alan Zhao: Before that, she was CRI at Cheddar as well as global VP of creative at BuzzFeed. Just a couple of awards so that our listeners are aware, Melissa was and is a Forbes 30 under 30 as well as Business Insider's 30 most creative people under 30. And today we're going to dive tactically into some of the plays she used to grow ClickUp.
Alan Zhao: Melissa, thank you.
Melissa Rossenthal: Thanks for having me excited to be here.
Alan Zhao: Awesome Why don't we um dive real quickly into your background so that people have an idea of what you've done?
Melissa Rossenthal: Yeah, absolutely. So my background, uh, I started very early BuzzFeed I was actually an intern there before I started working for fun there and Um, I feel like that really kind of laid the path for my entire career in marketing, um, and, and everything I've done since.
Melissa Rossenthal: And a couple of reasons. One, um, BuzzFeed, when I joined, was an idea at the time. It didn't really exist in its current form. Um, the [00:12:00] idea was, is there a way that we can think about the web as a social place and create the all encompassing social web where people connect and, And share things and create virality, um, through, through commonalities.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, and the core pillars of what I learned there were really how do you connect people, um, through emotion, um, through humor, through, um, through shared belief, through shared commonalities, and is there a way to create content that you can predict to go viral? So that using that as like a framework for everything that I've done since, um, I've always applied those ways of thinking to everything I've created.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, all of the marketing that, you know, me and my teams have won. He's always thought like, how do we form that sort of connection when, um, you know, I, I feel like you owe that to, to BuzzFeed, um, after BuzzFeed, I helped found a company called cheddar, almost the live media news company. Um, and I started that with our old BuzzFeed president, John.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, and then after that, I went into the world of B2B and SaaS. I click up and uh, and now I [00:13:00] am at inside 10 and back on the B2C side of things.
Alan Zhao: It's an amazing story. I'm always fascinated by people who have a B2C background and then translate that into B2B practices. So I think we'll dive into more Nickup, I'm sure.
Alan Zhao: Coming right into it, ClickUp, how did it start when you first joined? And then what was the story of growing it to 6 million?
Melissa Rossenthal: Yeah, ClickUp. Um, so I, after Cheddar, we, we sold Cheddar and I, I was kind of really just looking to figure out what my next move was, where, where do I see myself, um, after selling the company?
Melissa Rossenthal: And I, I kind of fallen out of love with media. I fallen out of love with sort of the opportunities that, that were left in the, uh, I, I felt like, you know, if we'd kind of just Uh On the the the well drive with with kind of what what was left there But I I was always fascinated by tech and um, I also saw this really awesome opportunity to be able to bring a Challenger brand a differentiated model and [00:14:00] way of thinking suited to the landscape now like the the fact that I wanted to do that and then was able to actually find a company that Believed that too and and was able to like You You know, I was able to do that there.
Melissa Rossenthal: I think there was a few really unique things. Um, But yeah, I I saw you know when I looked around in b2b Um, I just saw this like this very over hyper masculine Um visual design identity. Uh, I saw no humor. I saw Screaming value props. I saw like this hard selling that this wasn't done in the way that actually grabbed attention and never differentiated products from one another.
Melissa Rossenthal: You could look at one to the next and they all solve for the same thing. Um, so when thinking about how to build that brand, you know, the thought process was what is going to make us stand out and unique in the second most crowded market next to CRM. Um, and how do we be bold and vibrant? Um, um, luckily like, you know, I, uh, and part of the reason I joined was um, Our ceo said he is bold.
Melissa Rossenthal: He is vibrant. He's everything that the brand Is [00:15:00] extrapolated into um in market, you know is really core to him So I think when you're starting with a founder who um really embodies the brand that you're looking to build It makes it much easier and uh kind of push and pull against Someone that didn't believe in brand or didn't believe in the vibrancy and the boldness and differentiation that needed to happen in market, especially if you're a company that's looking to eventually IPO, um, you know, you have to, and you're going up against, you know, 10 to 50 billion market cap companies.
Melissa Rossenthal: You have to, you have to be bud or you won't survive.
Alan Zhao: Yeah, that's what, um, one of my mentors also said is like, you got to break some glass when you're small, you try to enter with all these, you got to be a little bit different and do some crazy stuff. Because otherwise, the default is you die. So, that's awesome that you did that.
Alan Zhao: So you joined the company, the founder was on your side. Um,
Melissa Rossenthal: yeah, I mean, he believed in brand from day one. He wanted a legacy brand and to build a legacy brand and market. You know, we were building best in class software, and to have a best in class brand to complement that, um, and to be able to tell our story, you know, was, uh, [00:16:00] With an important piece of it.
Melissa Rossenthal: So I, um, I made some hires, uh, I inherited a really great team to, um, a couple of people that kind of were, had the same vision, the same mission, the same buzzer, um, uh, on the brand side. And they were fantastic. And the company had already started to spin up a really strong SEO strategy, a really strong CRO strategy.
Melissa Rossenthal: So a lot of the, the. Kind of like being the groundwork is being laid to build this really, really incredible brand. So, um, then the, the differentiation part, um, was definitely a couple of hires that I made, uh, from my BuzzFeed days. Uh, I, I believe that in order to do what we wanted to do in market, uh, we needed to hire a fully in house creative agency and really build that from the ground up too.
Melissa Rossenthal: I, I didn't believe that we could use any agency that would be able to translate our vision into actual reality and do it. In an efficient way, um, and allow us to scale it. Uh, I, I, I don't know. I, I don't love agencies. I don't love working with agencies. I think like, um, it's, there's a push and pull with agencies that you just can't get, [00:17:00] um, the same output and the same excellence out of them that you, you would within building your own team in house.
Melissa Rossenthal: Major brands, I'm sure they compliment each other. If you're McDonald's or, or, you know, whoever, well, you need to have both. But, um, for us, you know, the vision was we want to do this well and we want to do this right. All right. Now. We're going to build our own team. So, uh, I hired, um, you know, a full production agency.
Melissa Rossenthal: I built that from From a lot of the amazing people that I worked with at buzzfeed. So not only is the you know, do the ideas and the the kind of like um, the The the vision come from that area of how do we buzzfeedify like b2b sass? We you know, I hired a lot of the people that I worked with there to To build a lot of all the creative and to be able to infuse every, every touch point, um, that a consumer and buyer would potentially have with us with that, that personality and the tonality that was different than everything else.
Melissa Rossenthal: And that really did start with hiring, you know, a team of people that, uh, were, you know, social first, that [00:18:00] were brand first, that were, uh, built, built within that ecosystem that could then apply it to B2B.
Alan Zhao: That's incredible. Honestly, it's very cutting edge because today building brands and being differentiated and being fun.
Alan Zhao: And B2B Sass is starting to become a, it's people are starting to catch up on that. But to do this five years back, like very or looking. Yeah. So
Melissa Rossenthal: I mean, and I, and I owe a lot to. Yeah, I would say I owe a lot to, you know, like, uh, Zeb and his vision also for being able to let me hire that team, you know, that, that was going out on a limb as well as saying that I need a couple million dollars to build and scale an agency internally to be able to do every, everything that we want to do in marketing.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, and be able to see that when, you know, we, we were at, we're a series, a company, it's kind of remarkable on his end as well. So, um, yeah, you know, it's the right place, right time, right group of people, uh, that have the vision that are able to do that and act on it together.
Alan Zhao: That's crazy. Couple of million at the series, a mark dedicated.
Alan Zhao: It is
Melissa Rossenthal: crazy. [00:19:00]
Alan Zhao: That's insane. Investment. Yeah, I know. I asked a lot,
Melissa Rossenthal: but that's what you need to deliver. Yeah,
Alan Zhao: wow, we might be able to get into a little bit of that like how you could convince management to let you do these longer term plays Um, but yeah So how did you execute the play now that you had the team?
Alan Zhao: What did they do every day? What was the strategy the creative team specifically,
Melissa Rossenthal: of course, it's like building a visual identity. It's building with ceiling It's building emotion for every single thing that you do. So we started to evaluate What are the assets that we come out with regularly? Um, you know our tutorial videos our product release videos Um, our, you know, uh, we were going to be scaling up paid advertising on YouTube and OTT was now, uh, you know, a big, a big channel for, for being able to, to show efficiency and scale.
Melissa Rossenthal: So thinking about like all of the places that we would play, um, how do we align our tonality and our personality with all of these different channels? So between, you know, all of these different assets, it's like, what, what is the, [00:20:00] like the, the throughput and the thread that connects all of them together?
Melissa Rossenthal: And it was humor. All right. So in our everything from a copy to our visual design, um, you know, it's, it's boldness, it's vibrancy and it's humor. Um, and if those three things kind of come across and then our brand stands strong and then everything else, you know, can be much more tied to, uh, the specific buyer and use case that you're going after the ICP.
Melissa Rossenthal: But from a holistic level, you know, we didn't really differentiate between, you know, consumer marketing and enterprise marketing. It's like, let's have our brand holistically. Feel like this in market. Let's have it be humorous. Let's have it be fold and vibrant and then everything else can kind of, you know, stretch out from there, um, and expand and be extrapolated into the ICP specific, you know, value froths and, and pain points that we need to come across.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, then we separated things out that way. But, but when we think about brand, um, holistically, how do you appear in market? So that's a little bit about how we thought about it. So, I mean, it was, everything was created in house. It was every single asset that you can imagine. We would create [00:21:00] songs. We hired a, a rapper.
Melissa Rossenthal: I mean, we, like, we did a lot of things that would really make us stand out. Um, we had the best motion graphics team. So every, every feature release had a song about the feature. Um, you know, thinking about, uh, inspired by like HBO and audio identity. Like what does it mean to have an audio identity? And instead of just releasing a feature, how do we, how do that?
Melissa Rossenthal: We release a feature with active jingle with vibrant popping sounds and visuals. And like, what does that look like? So really just putting a lot of thought into small decisions that eventually impact, you know, a broader strategy.
Alan Zhao: That's awesome. So now that you've had all these different mediums of delivering your message and then making it vibrant, making it unique.
Alan Zhao: What I've always heard is that if content at the end of the day, no matter how vibrant, how catchy it is, if it doesn't turn into pipeline, then it doesn't really help. And so there's this thinking that like every content that's produced in some way drives them through the buyer journey. So I'm just curious how you made those micro decisions.
Alan Zhao: Like, [00:22:00] how do I know what content to produce, in what frame, how do I
Melissa Rossenthal: Yeah, I mean, I think there's, like, holistically, our core ICPs that we're going after. When we're creating performance marketing ads, like, you know, there was both My belief system was that they can build brand, but also drive pipeline. And thinking about how we speak to that ICP and still that humorous tone, that vibrant tone, what does that look like?
Melissa Rossenthal: So all of a sudden you have your brand established, you have your personality of your brand established, and then it trickles down to those specific ICPs. So for example, um, you know, we would do a lot of research on reddit Um a lot of what what are what are software developers struggling with the most?
Melissa Rossenthal: And then turning those into humorous comedic frameworks to solve for their pain points So effectively you're able to just spin everything into the tonality of what your brand Would sound like what it would say how it would look Um, that's sort of how we would approach it. Um, oh, project managers are constantly struggling with X, Y, and Z, so we're going to create a humorous take and a humorous tone on that.
Melissa Rossenthal: [00:23:00] Um, so that we know that we're reaching the right people, we're reaching them with the right pain points, but we're also doing it in a way that's really going to stand out against the competition. So that's how we thought about it. And then there's obviously holistic brand awareness, in which you aren't nationally vaccine specific ICP, so our billboards.
Melissa Rossenthal: Two messages, every city that had knowledge workers that, um, we've, you know, we knew that what could potentially be using ClickUp and talking about it. And, uh, I did a lot of handpicking of billboards. So even that strategy was very, very hands on. I would physically pick out units and understand where they were in location to our competitors, headquarters or specific highways.
Melissa Rossenthal: And with people would communicate back and forth to work. Um, but brought more broadly, the brand messaging on that was, um, one app to replace them all. May it's going to make you look up what that is Even if you have no idea and save one day every week guaranteed a promise a value prop a message that you know Maybe people have a problem with uh, you know I think that the best thing that you can do without a phone is be a little bit Controversial and make people look you up make them do a double take make them talk about it Um, whether it's positive or [00:24:00] or negative, um, but you know, and you've done your job So there's that higher level of how everything sounds everything looks and feels and then there's The high level positioning messaging, um, what you want to do in market, then you're doing out of foam.
Melissa Rossenthal: And then obviously kind of calling that down to then fire a specific ICP type content.
Alan Zhao: So it seems like you really covered the entire funnel from very top awareness of them driving by in a quarantine, your billboard all the way to their ads, emails and everything being aligned.
Melissa Rossenthal: Yeah. I mean, I promised our sales team day one that we would always have a seat at the table.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, and I think, you know, that's what I delivered on. We will never be in a conversation where. Someone will bring up why I spoke up not here.
Alan Zhao: Yeah, it's fantastic. And how about the, um, the actual, the ideas of what campaigns run? How does that get generated? Yeah. And then do you have a process?
Melissa Rossenthal: That's, that's a great question.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, I mean, you know, at a, at a startup, it kind of, they come from all over. Um, they come from our [00:25:00] product marketing team. They come from our brand team. They come from our CEO. Um, I would say one of the most interesting campaigns that we ran was, um, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it was a campaign that we ran against JIRA.
Melissa Rossenthal: And it was uh, it was very polarizing and it was very reminiscent of the macverse pc ads from the 90s And we decided to do it for a couple reasons one because we were winning. Um such a consistent amount of deals Um, and we were able you know We're looking at some of the gong information in the chorus and in every deal we were winning over jira for a bunch of specific reasons And we're like well if we can win on on a like, you know, hand to hand combat level We should do a broader campaign against some of the things that people are struggling with Vera, um, and we also learned a lot of the kind of future things that jira was about to do They were a bit sunset there on fram.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, a lot of people weren't happy with that It wasn't a broad. I think it wasn't really available. The knowledge wasn't broadly available yet Um, it was just kind of on the on a basis of people finding out that this was going to happen The future prospect here of iris didn't know about it So Um, [00:26:00] we just felt like it was the right time to really attack our our competition and and go after them Obviously it was a pretty polarizing campaign But if you're going to go after a competitor you're going to punch up pick the 100 billion dollar market cap company, right?
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, so we went after them pretty hard. We created a series of uh of ads that we ran pretty heavily with heavily budgeted against youtube and and ott and they were about firing jira because of the reasons why jira was Failing at work and a lot of these really comedic ways of kind of representing the challenges that people were facing dealing with JIRA.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, and yeah, I mean, it went really well. You know, we were very popular in developer communities. The ads came up time and time again in, um, in discussions. We saw the, you know, the last touch attribution through, through some of the channels that we, um, that we pushed them on, but it was effectively, you know, a really, really successful campaign.
Melissa Rossenthal: And that came from, A mix of our sales team and our product marketing team and our brand team. Um, so, you know, it's it's a [00:27:00] combination Good ideas can come from anywhere And I think it's if you have the data pipeline and infrastructure to be able to support constant data flow Um data can produce a lot of really great ideas depending upon where you look
Alan Zhao: Can we go dive into the actual production of those ads that you put on YouTube?
Alan Zhao: I'm assuming it's people walking around and then you had to get a cast, you had to have a script, all that. So like, we're beginning to end.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, well, the first one we created, I'll talk about that one because it's my favorite. Um, we, we wanted to do something where the first ad we came out with would mirror a framework that people were actually used to seeing already.
Melissa Rossenthal: So we chose the pharmaceutical ad framework because it's just so recognizable. When you look up and you see a pharma ad, you know, it's a pharma ad, you know exactly what's going to happen. They're going to present, you know, sad people walking around putting their heads in the ground. And then all of a sudden, you know that the drug pops up and they're playing in fields with flowers and running around with puppies.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, and the fact that that was like such a universally known framework for an advertisement, we decided to just copy that. Um, [00:28:00] so we called it a better tool. And, um, you know, the, the pain and the consequences of using Jira were just horrible. You know, the result of the sadness and underperformance of work.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, and then the, um, you know, once we introduced a better tool, uh, you know, which was ClickUp. Um, we, you know, everyone is happy and they're high fiving and getting work done and it was just really great. You know, it mirrored more of like an SNL skit than it did a traditional advertisement. So it was sort of this like comedic take on it.
Melissa Rossenthal: It's really hard to, you know, even if you hate polarizing ads, like competitor, Um, ads like that, you know, it's hard to hate this because it's just so funny and well done. Um, so we wanted something that was easily kind of approachable. Um, and yeah, to film it, we used our entire team internally. I think the ad cost us two thousand dollars to make, which is incredible.
Melissa Rossenthal: Like, a two thousand dollar ad. Um, and that was, you know, the investment that we had. You know from all the the entire team that we had created and had in house Um, but we used all of our all of our actors were were employees. Um, we filmed [00:29:00] at our headquarters We filmed at our one of our colleagues apartment buildings.
Melissa Rossenthal: Um, we filled the public beaches. So no permits needed San diego, you're the one with no permit to film Um, yeah, I mean it really didn't cost as much money at all and it was one of the most effective ads We ever created