https://intercom.com/growth
Or You Could Use Intercom
Intercom 2018
Intercom's first out-of-home campaign included subway and billboard ads in SF, airport ads in Austin, and GTM spots across Facebook and Youtube.
- Me →
- design, illustration, video direction
- Collaborators →
- Chelsea Spratling copy Dani Balenson design, art direction Justin Pervorse, Stewart Scott-Curran creative direction Carly Wright production Brooks Chambers strategy Jason Yim, Lily Wang design Anna Alexia-Basile photography
Process
After getting the strategy and a few sample headlines locked, the core team had about four weeks to extrapolate that info into 10 lockups.
The concept for the campaign was simple, and employed a device Intercom had long used in marketing: old way vs. new way. If we could show you how outdated your current customer support strategies are, the value prop of Intercom will be clear.
Some concepts felt too cheeky for the mid-market or enterprise audience
We gravitated toward ads that didn’t just show software or happy customers
Obviously everyone wants to make a classic ad, but we knew “Or you could use Intercom” would only work if the viewer felt the ad-ness. They had to know to some extent that they were being advertised to.
But to setup our punchline, we needed to imagine up some bad products
We realized the world of "bad" products needed something to unify it. We needed a common enemy. "Bad" needed its own brand.
Average Business was born.
"Average Business was the Great Foil to Intercom for this campaign. It allowed us to create good bad good corporate design for a physical product line, and buy a domain that I may still someday use."
Dani Balenson
Designer, Tik-tok dancer
Under the umbrella of Average Business' cold, colorless, IBM meets no-name brand, authority it became easier to focus and iterate on individual elements.
Bart takeover
For the month of September, Intercom bought out every ad at Montgumery station—where thousands of visiting SaaS marketers and tech workers would be arriving for Dreamforce.
Youtube Ads
When a few agencies politely said no to our 6 week deadline, the duties of director (and obviously chief gaffer) fell on me. I grabbed a prop from our photoshoot, cut a cardboard stand, and gently positioned my iphone on a ladder to film a proof of concept.
To my surprise, my iphone sample won me the go-ahead from Brand Director Stew to please figure out what a "4k" is and please stop saying "sir yes sir".
I reduced all spots to a single shot—shifting the pressure to team strengths of prop visuals and motion graphics.
Jason Yim production designed, set designed, and modeled over the two day shoot. Dani Balenson and I designed the onscreen graphics, Lindenfield composed and produced the music, Brent Clouse assited with animation. I directed, edited, and engineered the audio.
Kyle is an designer and illustrator in Oakland, CA. He runs Very Cool, is a brand designer at GitHub, and runs Song Club Records (poorly).