Give the People What They Want

In June 2021, SurveyMonkey rebranded as Momentive to better highlight their enterprise solutions and distinguish the company’s broader portfolio from the self-serve SaaS surveys that helped make its name 20+ years earlier. As SurveyMonkey tried to balance disparate internal objectives, competitors swarmed in to seize share of mind and market share.

By the spring of 2022, SurveyMonkey looked to regain its leadership position in the market, improve financial performance, and address competitors increasingly bidding on their brand terms, which drove paid search costs up as much as 75%.

PMG led a mass market campaign — holistically across data, strategy, creative, influencer marketing, and media — to reinforce SurveyMonkey as a culturally-relevant brand and business solution, particularly during these turbulent times.

We expanded our audience to extend the voice of the brand beyond those already aware of SurveyMonkey, while still targeting business value-oriented decision makers. Audience research led us to tap into curious consumers’ mindsets as they go about their daily lives to reach the right people in the right places while raising awareness about how SurveyMonkey can inspire people and ideas to thrive. Through this, a consumer journey was born, as well as a unique opportunity for the brand to say something unexpected by challenging conventional wisdom.

Aligned to three customer mindsets — discover, experience and investigate — we delivered the company’s largest brand awareness campaign to date, leveraging a robust full-funnel media plan targeting CTV, digital, social, podcast integrations with iHeartMedia and Spotify, rich media, and digital out-of-home.

The integrated campaign also represented SurveyMonkey’s first foray into streaming with new ads featuring actor Giancarlo Esposito (“Breaking Bad,” “Do the Right Thing,” “The Mandalorian”). With a new tagline, “Give the people what they want,” the campaign enticed business leaders to listen to their customers and employees to make better business decisions.

Running nationally, the spot appealed to the unprecedented pressures business leaders have encountered in recent years. Appealing to the grit and perseverance of today’s leaders, Esposito delivers the answer to the question of what to do next: “Ask the people. Listen to them…And then act.”

The campaign also leveraged partnerships with top TikTok creators to celebrate the power of SurveyMonkey, including @yourrichbff, @imdrebrown, @sidneyraz, @herfirst100k, @astro_alexandra, @brittandjohnny, @taylor_loren, @nitetoast, @thecorporatechase, @callmebyyourcarl, @corporate.bro and enlisted YouTube creators in partnership with Studio71, including Jacksfilms, Josh Otusanya, Lauren Curtis, Bukola Ayodele, Brian Hull, and Jay & Sharon to create original branded content for the campaign. The influencers highlight a range of SurveyMonkey use cases, including employee feedback, event planning, and social media content planning.

The mass market campaign is helping SurveyMonkey reach its audience of business leaders through innovation and creativity. Our influencer creative led to more than 127MM video views, and caused the #surveymonkey hashtag on TikTok to skyrocket from 200k views to nearly 9 million in just four weeks. Our video campaign starring Giancarlo Esposito broke through the noise and quickly produced record engagement. With 530 million impressions to date, the campaign drove 3%-5% lift in brand awareness, recall, association, and favorability.

Search activity also validated the campaign’s success — query volume went up (and have stayed the case), and an increase in clicks, combined with paid search optimizations, delivered a 58% drop in brand CPCs, helping SurveyMonkey reallocate over $1.5MM in savings across other performance programs and channels. Downstream impact also included notable growth in sign-ups, reinforcing that SurveyMonkey was so much more than B2B, as the brand of choice for a new generation who wants to be heard.