https://www.campaignlive.com/article/mondaycom-makes-its-sup…
According to the article, Monday.com plans to air the 30 second commercial during the first half of the Super Bowl on Feb 13th, which “invites customers to sign up for Monday.com to make their work lives easier.”
Other noteworthy announcements included:
“While the spot marks the first time Monday.com will appear in the Super Bowl, Mann hinted it won’t be the last. Given that the company has an in-house marketing team of 90 people and a fully-fledged production studio that makes all of its marketing materials, there could be a day when Monday.com makes its Super Bowl ads in-house.”
And most importantly,
“Monday expects to double its marketing team in 2022 to bring in more designers, producers, animators and creative managers.”!!!
FlyForest
32 Likes
Yeh I was actually thinking and this is n=1 and in a Singapore IP address setting but I’ve been seeing a real uptick in Monday.com advertising on YouTube in the last month or so - back up to the saturation levels they were at about a year or two back and where Wix was about 4 years ago.
This is going to take serious $$$ budget on top of the investment in their marketing team.
FWIW I’m continuing to add what little I can on these drops, (alongside SentinelOne and Snowflake).
Ant
2 Likes
OK, I have to weigh in on this Super Bowl ad discussion. I worked for a number of years at an advertising agency and know a little about this, but I think most of the people commenting here know the same amount, just a little. Let’s give the management of this company we have invested in some credit and just assume that they likely know MORE THAN WE DO.
When an ad seller approaches an ad buyer with the opportunity to purchase media time, they present the buyer with all the information that they need to make a rational decision with their ad dollars. Using the Super Bowl as an example, they know who the viewers are, how old they are, their gender, their income, the size of their households, etc. They have plenty of data to go on and all of the potential buyers (think Monday.com) use this to compare to the group they are trying to reach.
For anyone who seeks to buy a 30 second spot on the Super Bowl they can expect to reach almost 100 million people for $6.5 million dollar. Think about that. 7 cents a person. That seems like a pretty good deal.
Now obviously they aren’t going to reach all of those people. And not all of the ones that the will reach are going to be the once that they want to reach. But guess what, THEY KNOW ALL OF THAT!
The fact is that the executives at Monday.com have done alot more thinking about this than we have and what’s more important is that they have the data to back up their decision making.
For the Super Bowl ad I am happy to trust management.
Jeb
28 Likes
$6.5 M for 100 M impressions is about $65 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions). Not the cheapest, (FB is closer to $20-25, YT is $3-20, but cheaper than AdWords or LinkedIn). It’s probably the best ad format since a ton of people are engaged with super bowl ads vs scrolling blindly through FB or skipping YT videos.
The fact is that the executives at Monday.com have done alot more thinking about this than we have and what’s more important is that they have the data to back up their decision making.
Pets.com
Quibbi
AmeriQuest Mortgage
Epidemic.com
E-stamp
FloTV
Computer.com
Lifeminders.com
OurBeginning.com
LifeMinders.com
These are all companies which advertised in the SuperBowl and which are out of business; most didn’t even last until the next SuperBowl. The risk is that you put so many of your eggs in that basket, if the ad doesn’t pay off you have little ammunition left (pardon the mixed metaphor.) Sometimes a slower, raindrop on the forehead approach is wiser, as it allows you adjust your message if it’s not working, or more efficiently target the segments you want to attract, or remind people at a time when they need the service. The other danger is that the SuperBowl is the place where the industry’s “most creative” put themselves on stage, so you are competing for attention in a crowded venue.
It’s telling that the list of Super Bowl Advertisers has a higher attrition rate than traditional advertising for repeat business (even with the “obligatory” categories of soda, beer, & chips repeating). Maybe there’s a reason?
The list from 2000 is instructive; there were 17 websites on display. These were businesses that depended on making a “big” impression - and didn’t. Many were gone quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_Bowl_commercials…
Oh. The list continues:
E1040.com
LastMinuteTravel.com
OnMoney.com
Netpliance
I offer this only as a rejoinder that “they know what they’re doing.” Maybe they do. I note that several firms in the same general category as Monday.com have tried this and failed. In fact more have failed than succeeded, although there have been some of those, too. I know this is not a typical post for this board, but I could not let the “they know what they’re doing” go unanswered. In advertising, many times they don’t.
46 Likes
Of course GoofyHoofy is right - this might very well fail.
But this article strongly suggests they are managing this roll out with a clear rationale, well-defined message, a sound plan, metrics for measuring success and they can afford it.
So the risk/reward is in their favor. If it fails try something else, damage relatively minimal. If it succeeds it plays a key role in massively increasing brand awareness and sales that follow.
Why B2B Monday.com Is Buying A Super Bowl Ad (And How It’s Measuring The Impact)
https://www.adexchanger.com/advertiser/why-b2b-monday-com-is…
Monday.com is spending more than 10 times what it’s ever invested in a campaign before to pitch itself during the game in hopes that the spot will spur the company into a new stage of growth and usage of the platform, said Guy Shriki, head of brand awareness and offline marketing. And like a good geeky B2B platform, monday.com built a robust measurement plan to find out if the 10x spend was worth it.
They clearly have a plan to either make this work or learn from it. They don’t deserve blind trust but if any company deserves some trust here to see how it goes, it’s these guys.
17 Likes
Goofy says Sometimes a slower, raindrop on the forehead approach is wiser…
Couldn’t agree more. Here’s a real life anecdote.
Sent a txt message to my 30-yr-old DS last night about Monday’s creative function hiring plans - he’s in the field and lives in NYC. His response…
Oh, Monday.com? I see their ads “all over the subway”.
Drip on the subway plus Super Bowl ad? I like it. Just hope that the creative folks did a bang up job in the ad spot. If it flops, well then, could be bad.
I’ll be watching…
'38Packard
2 Likes
Just hope that the creative folks did a bang up job in the ad spot. If it flops, well then, could be bad.
How is that bad?
MNDY’s annual marketing budget is $270 millions (67m x 4) and it’s growing at 15% per year.BTW, marketing expense is growing much slower than revenue growth of 80% to 90% per year. So MNDY is becoming increasing profitable. So next year, the annual marketing budget is approximately $270m x 1.15 = $310m. $6m cost for the Super Bowl ad is nothing. (2.2% of total marketing budget: $6m/$270m)
On top of that, MNDY has an in house business intelligence tool, you can call it a fancy name: AI.
This AI predicts the marketing campaign affectness before they actually implementing it. So it reduces wasefulness. If Super bowl doesn’t generate ROI as it intended, they will stop doing it next time. But from what I read, this won’t be the last time they do it. So they think it’ll worth the money. Last earning call, they said they will do something big to create more hyper growth. This can be one of the strategy.
Lastly,
Different growth rate generates different investment return.
Some are happy with 1% interest rate from saving account.
Some are happy with 10% to 15% from index funds.
Some are looking for 30% to 50% per year return like this board thus. It’s your choice.
18 Likes
Hi CloudL,
Just hope that the creative folks did a bang up job in the ad spot. If it flops, well then, could be bad.
How is that bad?
I think you misinterpreted the meaning of my post. Probably because I was not clear enough. I was thinking if their creative group put together an ad that was a “flop” meaning that people did not like it, then I think that would be bad for generating “good feelings” about the product.
I do believe that some Super Bowl ads have been flops in the past.
Best ~
'38Packard
Goofyhoofy, you do have a valid point about the ads.
Monday.com isn’t exactly a well known company (A household name) and giving that the Super Bowl ads reach a large mass of people (and many look forward to watching those ads). If there ad is entertaining enough, they will be talked about for many days after the Super Bowl.
Think Apple 1984 and E*Trade in 2008. I would say those were pretty successful in making many people aware of them.
The key is to have a very entertaining commercial, not a boring one. One where people will be; hey, did you see that ad for Monday.com? It was great. Super Bowl ads are the ones people talk about the next day.
Razz
1 Like
Monday has been doing interesting and entertaining advertisements for years. As 38packard pointed out (and I shared in my post last Nov 22), they have a been putting eye-catching ads in NYC subways for several years:
For those interested, here are a couple links showing some of the ads from the 2019 campaign:
https://www.molloykennedy.com/monday
https://medium.com/@ntenenini/subway-ad-5-monday-com-123eb0e…
After the 2019 campaign they did market awareness surveys and the results were positive enough that they redid this in 2021 (also taking advantage of lower rates for given the decrease in subway ridership).
Whether or not this will be worth the spend, only time will tell. But in today’s social media environment it is much easier for companies to follow-up a big SB ad spend with targeted campaigns vs in 2000 (pets.com, Quibbi, etc.). Back then the SB ads were mostly a moonshot, a main event with a few replays on TV networks. and some were successful in the longer term - eTrade is one of those from 2000.
These days the ads are a linchpin of the larger campaign where they are viewed on YouTube millions of times and followed up with campaigns on TikTok, Instagram, FB, etc. And Monday clearly has a “post-game media plan” in place. So I don’t think the comparison with those failed companies is completely accurate.
You can look at companies that did this in the more recent past with some level of success - GoDaddy and Rocket Mortgage are two that come to mind. They were smaller lesser known companies that had significant growth after their SB ads and surrounding campaigns. And of course there is the iconic 1984 Apple ad that launched the MacIntosh. So if done right, they can work.
One more note on the Pets.com comparison - they certainly didn’t fail because they spent $1.2M on a SB ad. They failed because they lacked any market research and had a failing business model.
In fact many people believe the ad was done more to garner larger interest in the coming IPO so they could raise more money - and that certainly worked for them. So from that perspective you could say the SB was worth the spend for them.
8 Likes