Autodesk and Maximum Effort Buy Into More Human B2B Marketing

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.

“If you’re constantly trying things with the intention of creating a feeling, then you’ll learn fast and find success faster,” said George Dewey, co-founder of Maximum Effort. “And then maybe CFOs can focus on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance instead of marketing? I’m a dead man for saying that.”

Converting the masses

Even B2B buyers are consumers to a degree. In Autodesk’s case, it wants those buyers from other companies to see its big-picture ads with the schoolkids, chase some of those design features to the company’s ecommerce store, and become customers and clients.

“We approach B2B in a similar manner to B2C because even though the sales cycle of B2B is longer, we think the anchoring effect of entering through a feeling is critical,” Maximum Effort’s Dewey said. “And that feeling can actually increase as people go through the sales funnel.”

Treseder noted that the brand campaign isn’t doing all of the work: It gets a lot of support from demand generation, industry and portfolio marketing, and then the digital and ecommerce teams all driving sales and revenue. Connecting all of it into a single, broad strategy makes it easier to determine just how effective the ads are—but also gives Autodesk the freedom to target those campaigns to its audience’s passions.

Autodesk is used to design and build bridges, buildings, movies, games and countless other items through its various software products. However, when Treseder first arrived at the company, customers were often more familiar with the individual products than they were with the greater Autodesk brand. That said, they felt as strongly about those products as Peloton consumers felt about their bikes and classes.

“If you had told me that, becoming CMO of Autodesk I would meet someone who had a tattoo of one of our products on their body, I would have been like, ‘No.’” she said. “One of our customers said, ‘I can’t tell the story of my career without telling the story of Autodesk.’”

Autodesk tailors the message slightly for architects, mechanical engineers, general contractors and other customers looking to the company for specific needs, but Treseder said the value of Autodesk’s brand and products remains at the core of its marketing. It also maintains an humble, optimistic, lighthearted tone that Treseder views as a reflection of the company culture.

By striking that tone and centering voices other than its own—like the visual effects artists and restorers in its Notre Dame Cathedral campaign from earlier this year—Treseder said Autodesk made a conscious decision to avoid B2B’s tendency toward stern, rational marketing. Maximum Effort believed a drier, more straightforward approach was a poor fit for Autodesk’s diverse offerings.

“An emotional moat around a brand is just as valuable as a technological moat,” Dewey said. “We believe if people enter through laughter or joy, it saves time and money in the long run.” 

Finding your people

While Treseder’s strategic, business-minded approach helped sell her team’s brand campaigns with Maximum Effort to the C-suite, Dewey said her consumer background made it much easier to find common creative ground.

Dewey noted that B2B marketers’ penchant toward a rational approach often prevents them from emotionally connecting with clients and buyers—making it easy to disrupt a brand’s message. Treseder, meanwhile, has seen the “time and place for risk” and knows when a friendlier approach outweighs a flood of information. 

“She also has an overarching messaging strategy of which we are just a part,” Dewey said. “We’re not trying to win awards or increase fees or be anyone’s AOR, and because we focus on cultural impact, it frees both us and our partners up.”

In Treseder’s view, that creativity is directly linked to exponential growth. By maintaining a strong internal team at Autodesk and bringing in Maximum Effort for a bit of outside perspective, Treseder is bringing together creative minds to solve a business problem—which a company’s finance team tends to love.

“Having that great partner means that you have someone who’s in it with you,” she said. “It’s when you come together that you’re able to really achieve greatness and do things that make a massive difference—that exceed expectations.”