10 examples of killer creative in B2B marketing

No, I’m not going to do it.

If you want to see it (again!) you can go to doubleyew doubleyew doubleyew dot google dot com and YOU can search for ‘Van Damme doing the splits on a truck going backwards’.

Look, it’s still a really, really good ad and this list will be guilty of lying by omission, but I simply cannot (in good conscience) include it. You’ve seen it, it’s killer. If you haven’t seen it, I am willing to purchase the rock you’ve been living under because I could do with some peace and quiet.

Instead, here is a drawing of it I just did at my kitchen table:

Now that we’ve dealt with that, here are 10 other killer bits of B2B creative, in no particular order with some nice little lessons (or ‘learnings’ as marketers seem to like calling them):

1. Adobe Marketing Cloud ‘Click, Baby, Click’
2. Mailchimp ‘Did you mean Mailchimp?’
3. Slack ‘So yeah, we tried Slack…”
4. Spotify, Wrapped for advertisers
5. CrowdStrike ‘Troy’
6. Shopify ‘Let’s make you a business’
7. Gartner ‘Magic Quadrant’
8. Hubspot ‘The Growth Show’
9. Dropbox ‘Work in progress’
10. Cisco ‘Cyber Threat Response’ comic book

• • •

1. Adobe Marketing Cloud ‘Click, Baby, Click’

Lessons:

• Drama and hyperbole, when applied to frankly boring stuff, are your friend.
• Poking fun at the technical aspects of something (i.e. marketing KPIs) is a good way of demonstrating specific domain knowledge and ingratiating yourself with an audience.
• Sound and audio design matters as much in B2B as anywhere else so gussy up the Grieg and get ready to part in the Hall of the Mountain King: it’s marketing software time, my dudes.

2. Mailchimp ‘Did you mean Mailchimp?’

Lessons:

• Understand how people genuinely approach your brand and you’ll have a competitive edge in creativity. Mistakes, like search errors, (i.e. Mail shrimp, Kale limp) offer as much insight into customer behaviour as anything else.
• Get weird when you can. Don’t be afraid to go off-the-deep-end wild.
• Go all in on a good idea. Mailchimp created alternative YouTube handles, songs, entire mini brand languages for their fake-out cousin companies.

3. Slack ‘So yeah, we tried Slack…”

Lessons:

• Make SaaS a little bit sassy (lol, sorry) by picking on weird / dumb / legacy organisational behaviour. People will relate to the enemies you point out.
• This is one of the few times when faking customer testimonials will add value to your brand free from possible reprisal.
• Demonstrating product features really, really doesn’t need to feel like you’re hitting someone in the face with a frying pan (though: that ‘spaaang’ noise is really satisfying in Tom and Jerry).

4. Spotify, Wrapped for advertisers

Lessons:

• Data can be your creative if you’re smart with how you use it.
• Seasonality is good, even in B2B. Marketers are people, and people like their little events to look forward to.
• Sometimes, your B2B customers are also your B2C customers.

5. CrowdStrike ‘Troy’

Lessons:

• In horribly homogeneous markets (hello cyber security, I’m talking about you babe), you HAVE to find a way to be visually and tonally distinctive.
• Old stories (sometimes the oldest) can be made new with the right context and a smart script.
• Nothing funnier than someone with a clipboard (or equivalent) in an incongruous situation. Remember this.

Bonus joke:
– Knock knock.
– Who’s here?
– Ulysses.
– Ulysses who?
– Ulysses me coming next time and won’t need to ask who it is!

6. Shopify ‘Let’s make you a business’

Lessons:

• Simple, straight-laced, empowering. You don’t need to be funny to connect with people.
• Great targeting, owning a segment (i.e. digitally native entrepreneurs), being highly specific. Constraints breed creativity in the execution
• Multi-channel, including vacant shopfront takeovers. Smart, non-standard media buying can really make the creative sing.

7. Gartner ‘Magic Quadrant’

Lessons:

• Creative solutions aren’t always words or pictures or jingles or memes.
• A strategic deliverable as a creative output is really pretty clever. It’s based on the deepest fear and greed impulses of all B2B tech people: the need to be in the top right-hand corner of any chart.
• Positions Gartner as an industry-wide benchmark. This is how you own a category.

8. Hubspot ‘The Growth Show’

Lessons:

• ‘Creative’ can be a deliciously long series that helps solve problems. If you’re basically a content marketing platform, it makes a lot of sense that your creative should also be content.
• It can also be putting your customers front and centre, letting their creativity shine through and enabling you to bask in the warm glow of their humbling successes.
• Like training a toddler, sometimes you need to do the thing you’re doing for longer than you think you need to. There are a lot of eps. of the growth show and they get better and better.

9. Dropbox ‘Work in progress’

Lessons:

• Whaaaat? A blog that’s positioned as ‘killer creative’? Well, yes. It is such a good encapsulation of what Dropbox does, and how customers use the service.
• Work in Progress is a fantastic bit of naming. Naming of brand assets can really make a difference.
• Like Hubspot, celebrating the creativity and ingenuity of others (i.e. your customers) can be a great way to position your own org as creatively minded.

10. Cisco ‘Cyber Threat Response’ comic book

Lessons:

• Hey! Marshall McLuhan was onto something! The medium is the message! If you want to target a niche audience (i.e. cyber sec geeks) think about what formats they might favour.
• Playing with format can’t just be a gimmick – the messaging and execution really have to stack up. And CTR does.
• People will read things that are interesting. Sometimes the content isn’t too long, it’s too boring.

• • •

(Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash)