HOW TO MAKE B2B ADVERTISING MEMORABLE

This past June at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky made a bold challenge to the industry. He declared, “In five years every single creative person in this room is going to be dying to work on B2B. B2B advertising has to be as creative as B2C.”?

I love this challenge. Regardless of whether it’s B2B or B2C, people want to hear great stories. Therefore, as geared to B2B marketing, your playbook should be similar to ones used for B2C. To make your work memorable and your B2B advertising successful, you must infuse your work with humanity and emotion.

Recently, at the Dreamforce conference, I had the opportunity to discuss with Salesforce what I think are the most important tenets of effective and entertaining B2B advertising.?

HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR

The same is true for people as for brands: people gravitate toward those who make them laugh. B2B advertising has historically not been a home for humor or creativity because business is supposed to be serious. But B2B can be funny. I’m most proud of the work we’ve done for Adobe and, recently, Autodesk.?

Adobe’s big challenge was growth—they wanted to be seen not just as a resource for creatives but also as a partner for the marketing department. One of my favorite pieces of work is a spot called “Mean Streets” for Adobe Marketing Cloud. It’s a hilarious spot that shows what can go wrong when we’re not paying attention to analytics.?

The end lines are “Do you know what your marketing is doing? We can help.” So in addition to laughing, you come away thinking, “Adobe really understands my business problem, and Marketing Cloud can help with that.” It stands out because you don’t see a lot of humor in the category, and because of that, it works—the campaign drove a 130% increase in search volume and a 10% increase in revenue.

Another favorite piece of B2B work that GS&P has done is a recent campaign for Autodesk. Construction sites are rife with miscommunication, which can lead to pricey rework, long delays and some pretty peeved clients. Luckily, Autodesk is here to help, but not before having a laugh at the problem.

Through a humorous game of jobsite telephone, the spot highlights how many opportunities for mix-ups there are on construction projects. What starts out as a simple “Redo this wall” quickly gets misinterpreted as it’s passed along a busy jobsite and leads to a rather irreversible result. The commercial then offers Autodesk Construction Cloud as a solution that keeps everyone on the same page—at every stage.?

The campaign drove a threefold increase in organic search volume over the first two months, with ad engagement and video views exceeding all-time highs for Autodesk Construction Cloud campaigns.?

USE CHARACTERS?

One of the biggest challenges you face as an advertiser is brand recall and getting people to remember the name of your company. Using characters makes it that much easier, but you have to ask yourself, Are the characters relatable? Are they characters your audience will have empathy for? Will your audience want to see them again in the next spot?

Apple is currently doing a great job with their B2B work, which features characters, in Escape from the Office.

It’s a nine-minute film that has a killer story arc with lots of highs and lows. It’s got a diverse quartet of memorable, funny, relatable characters who tell their boss to stuff it and drive off in a tiny car to start their own business. The film is extremely hardworking. It showcases a wide array of Apple products—iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, all of which we normally think of as consumer electronics—but it presents them as business essentials: everything you would need to make a start-up happen. But the most important thing is that the action in the film is completely over-the-top, and while you’re learning about how their products fit into a business context, you’re laughing the entire time.?

BAKE DIVERSITY INTO THE IDEA

If you’re concepting a commercial, think about who those characters are as you’re writing the story. Be inclusive.?

During the Olympics this year, for Comcast Business, we told the story of a Paralympic gold medalist, Mike Schultz, who also happens to be a very successful businessperson. In 2008, amid a successful snowmobiling career, Schultz was involved in a crash that led to the amputation of his left leg below the knee. A standard prosthetic leg helped Schultz get back on his feet, but it wasn’t built for the action sports he loved. So Schultz designed and built his own prosthetic leg from scratch. He not only got himself back into competition but also eventually transformed the high-tech idea into a successful business. Today Schultz is a US Paralympic gold medalist, and more than 20 Paralympians have used Schultz’s prosthetics to compete in the Paralympic Games. It’s an inspiring tale of perseverance and resilience that appeals to business owners (the target audience for Comcast Business) and viewers of the Olympics and Paralympics alike.

Inclusive thinking comes from a creative department with people who have different perspectives. Diversity is something ad agencies have struggled with, so in 2021 GS&P opened a tuition-free ad school to bring in people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.?

Increasing our diversity of creative talent has impacted our work for the better of our agency and the greater good. Our diverse teams have exposed a number of uncomfortable inequities in society, from police brutality to inequitable health care.?

A year after the January 6 insurrection, GS&P became one of the only companies to ask the uncomfortable question weighing on so many people’s minds when it came to the people who ransacked the Capitol: “What if they were Black?” More than just talking about the day, GS&P, in partnership with the Courageous Conversation Global Foundation, remembered the systemic bias we witnessed.?

?To create the campaign, we worked with Black artists Timothy Bluitt Jr. and Casandra Burrell to make insurrectionists like the QAnon Shaman Black. The shirts reminded people of systemic racism within the justice system, including the fact that Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police and five times more likely to be imprisoned than White people are.

This fall we helped Genentech address the issue of systemic racism in health care head-on with “Ask Bigger Questions” campaign. Our campaign depicts the beginning of a lifelong journey that Black women know all too well—a journey riddled with unnecessary obstacles within the health-care system. With 224,080 new cancer cases and 73,680 cancer deaths expected to occur among Black people in 2022, the ad underscores the urgent need to act now to address health-care inequities and drive systemic change. The “Ask Bigger Questions” campaign is Genentech’s larger effort to advance health equity by asking bold questions to address the greatest challenges in health care. To authentically represent women’s experience, Genentech and GS&P ensured that the production team was led by diverse voices in every aspect of preproduction and postproduction.?

Ultimately, at the end of the day, we all need to remember that B2B should be just as creative as B2C. Business people need and deserve to laugh, to be entertained and to be recognized inclusively. Delivering that in your marketing and advertising efforts is just good business for you and the industry.