'90s Search Campaign (Yext)

Challenge
Yext had a problem with product and brand awareness. Keyword search, the dominant technology powering how businesses surface information to customers, was outdated in ways most businesses didn’t realize. Yext offered the modern alternative. We needed to get B2B buyers to feel urgency about the infrastructure they'd always taken for granted and capture their awareness of – and interest in – Yext in the process.

Role
Creative Director across all channels and phases: TV commercial, DOOH, print, digital, microsite, social, email, and employee activation. Guided the processes, workflows, and overall orchestration of the campaign alongside the CMO and PMs, aligning three external agencies and a large cross-functional internal team.

Approach
The insight we built off of was that keyword search didn't feel outdated because it never announced itself as such. So we made it announce itself. The creative strategy was to cast keyword search as the villain, leveraging '90s nostalgia as both the aesthetic and the evidence: this technology hasn't evolved, here's the proof, and Yext offers the modern upgrade. The campaign used humor to make a dry infrastructure argument feel visceral and shareable through a multi-phased, multimedia approach throughout the year.

Impact
The campaign moved numbers across every channel we cared about: reach, engagement, and awareness. It saw a 121% QoQ increase in site traffic, 90% QoQ increase in video views, 45% QoQ increase in new social followers (majority organic), 7.6MM DOOH impressions (2x industry benchmark). Earned press reached 560K+. Beyond the metrics, one of the signals we were proudest of: people posting unprompted across Twitter and LinkedIn about assets they loved. That's signaled not just a campaign that performed, but one that landed.

The campaign won the Shorty Award for Mid-Sized Brand of the Year, with additional wins in Humor, Comedy Video, and Multi-Platform Presence, and finalist nods in B2B, LinkedIn, Integrated Campaign, and Medium-Length Video.