Being simple ain’t easy.

My role

Creative Director 
Campaign Strategy, Art Direction, Consultation, Video Production.

My TEAM

Chris D, Brand
Simon T, Brand
BX Films, Agency

Cisco Meraki makes an undeniable product, and that usually puts us in an easy position when it comes to marketing those products. However, as we neared the extent of the reach of word-of-mouth, buzz, and other organic growth we took a look at the the brand itself. And what we found was that our brand was not as undeniable as our products were.

As Creative Director at Meraki, and a shepherd of the brand, I took that challenge personally as we embarked on Meraki’s first big brand awareness campaign.

A brand is more than just a punchy color palette and nifty typography, it’s an emotional connection wrapped in a sly moment of recognition. And we had to get our recognition game way up.

The Problem Statement

When your brand marketing manager comes to you and says, the brand sentiment is doing great, that's a big win. However, when he follows up with brand awareness is lower than it should be, you take that to heart. Together we conceived of several strategies to incrementally raise brand awareness and leverage the relationship with our parent company, Cisco, to signal boost those efforts.

However, there was still plenty of room for Meraki to bring a unique voice to the table. Parent brands and sub-brands often have a tricky relationship, but usually strong growth makes everybody happy. To continue that growth, we made a big bet on brand awareness through an ambitious digital campaign and gave ourselves the task of developing Meraki's first ever brand awareness campaign.

The Strategy

Working closely with the Brand & Experience team, I helped brainstorm a series of video ads- supported by Meraki’s first print campaign.

Most networking professionals in popular media are presented as socially awkward nerds who fix computers, so we saw a great opportunity to steer away from cliche tell some stories rooted in the personalities of real folks.

The Media

The customer base is passionate and is typically depicted negatively in the media, so we looked position Meraki as an ally who "gets it" as well as a great networking solution.
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Using robust ad targeting, we aimed the spots at our key demos to not only drive B2B sales, but also to build positive brand perception and raise awareness via Hulu ads.

The Execution

Working with a local video production house, we created a series of ads focused on highlighting the types of scenarios our customer base find themselves in, with a bit of a wink.

We put together a diverse cast of local actors to help us bring to life the juxtaposition of the day-to-day benefit of using Meraki products with a lively and irreverent office environment.

The Campaign

In addition to acting as producer on the video ads, my team and I created print ads and a landing page to support the campaign.

We created swag to excite our sales team and incentivize our reseller partners to promote the campaign. It became one of our most popular branded items.

Featured Work