Customer.io wanted brand campaign ideas that couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s. I led the concepts that got its leadership talking, and ended up on a billboard at Dreamforce.
Under its theme “Connections that compound”, Customer.io asked for brand awareness concepts across four tracks: product-focused, emotionally resonant, provocative and its new Builder Plan. Then it set the bar: if you could slap a Braze or Iterable logo on an idea and it still worked, it was too generic.
We started wide: 16 concepts across the four tracks, each one pressure-tested against that competitor-logo rule.
The provocative track stood out, and the client narrowed in on it for activations around Dreamforce, asking for a spectrum from current risk all the way to “really risky”.
Three concepts went to the execs, each with a full narrative arc, a copy system and out-of-home executions, so leadership could see exactly how far every idea could run.
Customer.io’s CEO and CMO loved the strikethrough ads, and the work went on to Dreamforce.
