Xero
Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, Xero is one of the fastest growing software as a service companies globally. They are the market leaders in New Zealand, Australian, and United Kingdom for cloud accounting. We had the pleasure of working together on many projects to build their awareness and user base in the United States and below are a few of our favorites.
Using Clouds To Promote Cloud Based Accounting.
Xero was looking for something that would stand out, be memorable, shareable, attract new customers and help build the brand in the US.
To accomplish this we were the first company to use “actual clouds” to promote a cloud based product. How we did this was set 5 planes into the sky to skywrite our message. We strategically chose to do this over a popular Tech Conference hosted by TechCrunch as well as the San Francisco Giants baseball game. Our message was 8 miles long and was visible throughout the entire city and surrounding area. generating over a million social media impressions and multiple traditional media mentions.
Polite Disruption of the Competition
We were given the challenge politely disrupting a competitors conference. Saying that a different way, we were tasked with getting more attention at a competitors conference without losing the respect of Xero customers and starting a war with the competitor for no reason.
Our solution was to create a spectacle. We chose to have someone sitting at the front door of the event who for the entire morning “sat on a cloud”, talking to people, taking pictures and most importantly let people going inside to the event who in the exhibit hall they should go talk to first.
This drew a lot of attention because we added value to the event. Instead of selling our product or offering a discount we used our attention to promote our mutual partners who were exhibiting at the event who support both companies. We also got a lot of social media attention. A mention and photo on the local news (who though the event was from Xero) and the Xero logo was all over the conference floor through the twitter wall.
Bonus Video
A year after the campaigns we received a tweet with the following video from the Founder of Xero. They asked a bunch of people who they heard of the brand and this was a constant answer.