The challenge facing Zoom these days is not that people do not know it exists. Quite the contrary. According to a recent YouGov survey, the company enjoys 99 percent brand awareness among users of workplace communication tools — a figure that would make most marketers weep with envy. The problem is that everyone who knows Zoom knows it as exactly one thing: the place where you sat in your spare bedroom in 2020, pretending your internet connection was worse than it was.
Kim Storin, who became Zoom's chief marketing officer in April, has been charged with convincing the world that the company has moved on, even if the world has not. Her weapon of choice is comedy, delivered by a small troupe of "Saturday Night Live" alumni.
The campaign, called "Zoom Ahead" and created with No Notes, the creative agency founded by Colin Jost, features Kate McKinnon as a supervillain whose schemes are foiled by her minions' dependence on Zoom's various collaboration tools. (The minions, it seems, need to videoconference about their evil deeds, which rather undercuts the villainy.) A previous installment starred Bowen Yang.
"A typical user has no idea that the breadth of the Zoom portfolio goes so much further," Ms. Storin said, in what may be the most polite way of saying that the company's own success has become its cage.
The approach — using broad comedy to smuggle in a corporate repositioning message — is not without precedent on Madison Avenue, though it requires a light touch to avoid feeling like a PowerPoint deck wearing a clown nose.
Whether audiences will come to see Zoom as a productivity platform rather than a pandemic artifact remains uncertain. But at least the henchmen seem convinced.
Original story published in Fast Company: "Zoom wants to reintroduce itself, courtesy of SNL's biggest stars"