“What the heck does that mean?”
That’s the reaction from a lot of people in San Francisco who drive or walk past the latest Stytch advertising campaign. Many who see the billboards will just shake their heads and think, “only in San Francisco” - home of Series B Startups.
But the developers who build the internet are a different story. When they see the latest Stytch advertising campaign, they not only get it, they love it. They practically wrote it. (In some instances they completely wrote it.)
Last year, I did a Stytch campaign with the boutique ad agency Division of Labor and it reminded us all how much we hate remembering passwords. This year’s campaign is telling a very different story. Stytch is about a lot more than just passwordless authentication. It’s an entire platform for developers who build authentication. And building those pages and having them work seamlessly can be quite a chore.
But not with Stytch, the series B startup that auth developers know and love but the general public doesn’t really know. They’ve developed a modern platform that let’s developers build authentication without workarounds or writing thousands of lines of additional code. And while that message may not resonate with the majority of San Franciscans, it can create an emotional connection with those who do understand.
Tourists, confused. Seagulls, confused. Developers, having a good laugh.
Division of Labor specializes in working with Series B Startups and tech companies like Stytch. Of course, before we can develop ad campaigns like this, we have to dig into the product and figure out what it is we’re talking about. Our clients at Stytch were incredibly patient with us as we iterated on ideas and stared with blank faces as they took us into the depths of the GitHub universe. After poking around a bit on Reddit, we came away with a simple visual that would instantly convey the benefits of Stytch while simultaneously flying over the heads of the non-coding majority.
Pair the visual with a headline like git commit -m “auth, simplified” and you’ve got yourself Series B Startup advertising gold.
The Captcha executions are especially fun because of the stupid irony they display; humans spending time convincing robots that we’re not robots. Meanwhile, robots are better at solving Captchas than we are! Infuriating. The idea came out of a human insight; the irritation we all feel when we’re served up a Captcha. But when Stytch founder Juliana Lamb pulled out the fact that bots are now more skilled at solving these things than humans, the messaging got more focused and highlights the fact that Stytch has a better way. Check out the entire campaign here.
Thanks to everyone at Stytch who continues to be amazing clients. There are a lot of great San Francisco ad agencies out there and I’m thrilled Stytch chose Division of Labor.
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The Freelance Copywriter San Francisco Blog is written and produced by Josh Denberg; a top freelance copywriter, creative director, content writer and founder of Ad Agency Division of Labor. Click HERE to discuss a project.