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A company doesn’t have to tell a buyer every detail and benefit of its product to prove its value. It just needs to show it in action.
B2B marketers, with the help of their creative partners, increasingly see the merit in sparing the detail and sending potential clients a succinct, meaningful message. Convincing their CFO or finance department to share that vision and invest can be a bit tougher.
In September 2022, Dara Treseder left the CMO role at consumer-focused fitness company Peloton to take the same position with B2B software design platform Autodesk. By November 2022, Autodesk brought on Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort as its creative and strategic partner—launching their relationship with an ad that aired during The Walking Dead series finale.
By March, Autodesk and Maximum Effort were calling in actors Ron Perlman and Elizabeth Banks for an Oscars campaign built around fictional Hollywood legend Otto Desc.
Those campaigns are driving traffic to Autodesk.com—which has 4% more visitors than it did a year ago—and the most recent Maximum Effort spots gave the company an immediate 14% bump. But both Treseder and her CFO, Debbie Clifford, hold MBAs from Stanford and aren’t easily dazzled by what some in B2B have dubbed “vanity metrics.”
By backing up leading metrics like views and clicks with lagging indicators including direct revenue—which increased 18% from sources including Autodesk’s online store and now accounts for 37% of all company revenue—Treseder makes an argument for her team’s marketing strategy in terms her financial counterpart understands well.
“We’re both putting the business first. … It’s about how we achieve our business objectives and our business goals,” Treseder said. “Often, as CMOs, where it gets tough is when we’re not speaking the same language as the rest of the executive team… not speaking the same language as our CFO.”
Autodesk and Maximum Effort recently teamed up on a few more ads featuring students in a classroom exploring the potential of the company’s software to both change the world and help them mess around. Maximum Effort noted that “impact tends to be self-evident” and encouraged B2B companies to take more chances.
While they don’t recommend spending nine months and millions of dollars on one campaign, Maximum Effort noted that there’s value in B2B being as creative as its consumer counterparts.