I had chimed in on FlyForest’s thread a week or so ago about Monday.com’s Super Bowl ad and the fact that the spend that is required to get in front of the HUGE Super Bowl audience MAY be worth the money spent - as long as the ad did not flop.
jonwayne235 started this thread about Monday’s ad spend for the Super Bowl ad https://discussion.fool.com/mndy-ad-spend-35042470.aspx?sort=who… 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…
So I decided to do some objective digging into what the reviews might have to say about Monday.com’s Super Bowl ad to see if they had a “winner” or a “loser”. Here’s what I discovered:
A panel of experts at the Kellogg School graded the ads on business-related metrics, such as whether the ad was memorable and unique as well as whether it tied into brand messaging. Kellogg List graded the ad with a “D” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/super-bowl-commercials-2022-bes…
Last time I shared my views on this I was berated a bit, so I’ll leave my comments out. Ya’ll can come to your own set of conclusions regarding whether the investment in the production of the ad and the expense to air it was worth the reaction that the ad received.
Thanks for consolidating the list of all the threads made about the advertisement. I didn’t think we needed all those separate threads and hopefully no one makes any new ones.
When watching the Superbowl last night, I had waited eagerly all of the first half for the advertisement to be aired, as they had announced it would be played during the first half of the game. Nope. Turns out, they played it towards the end of the halftime show, just before the beginning of the second half. I found this particularly disappointing, because I felt like this coincided with the time that people would most likely be going to the bathroom or running to grab more food before the beginning of the second half. I would hope they paid less than average since the ad ran at what seems like such a poor time.
Nevertheless, the thing I think everyone needs to keep in mind is that Monday.com is CLEARLY the best of all our companies in terms of rapidly growing enterprise customers<\b>. No other company I know of that’s the size of monday is more than tripling this cohort. So before all the self-proclaimed world class marketers and advertising experts some bring their weighty opinions on whether this was/is a disaster for their business, remember that their customer growth numbers command<\b> our trust. And Feb 23rd will give us the chance to see whether or not they will continue to.
Monday from my understanding has about 90 marketing specialists. I think is wise to say that they have a better idea on how to create their marketing strategy and what works best for that strategy- than us posting random anecdotal evidence of what may or may not be an effective spend on their marketing budget. I don’t see how anyone here can be in that position, to judge.
We need to evaluate the company based on what they deliver, and so far they have delivered impressive metrics across the board, and their marketing team has something to do with their success.
I first thought the ad was okay, but in terms of generating buzz, excitement it was objectively a flop.
By their own admission it was rushed, and they played it safe.
On bright side, the company is well run, has great products and is obviously operating in a space with massive TAM. So they don’t need to be dominant from here for the stock to make it back to 20B valuation. Short term I’m not too worried.
But my gut screams that if you’re taking on Microsoft, Atlassian, a fierce, well-capitalized rival in Asana and Adobe has a product, you have to do much better than this. Think about what Apple did with the ad where the woman threw the hammer through the dystopian 1984-world. This ad doesn’t feel like it has the blood n guts of a radical disruptor. It’s as safe as anything you might see from Cisco or any old, tired corporate behemoth who makes ads with teams of lawyers.
I was hoping for something bold, exciting, something that was the ad equivalent of Mel Gibson in Braveheart riling up the troops for war. Something that suggested massive improvement to your everyday work life. This felt like a few cliche taps on a bugle. The copy was wordy and visuals suggested chaos as much as possibility.
Bottom line - it was a risk worth taking and likely did no harm. I’ve seen better ones in the series for web where they show people using Monday’s product, which looks great. But for me, it is a miss, it was rushed, uninspired, dismissible, not the herald of a far better “Work OS.” It went out on a big stage and tripped on its ball gown. The worry is that if marketing is key to their global expansion, they may not be up to the task.
While we all know about MNDY’s stellar enterprise customer growth, I think maybe people still underestimate how significant this is.
MNDY has 613 enterprise customers (each spending > 50K ARR) and a total of ~145,000 customers.
Enterprise customers account for 15% of its revenue despite being only 0.4% in number.
This implies that an enterprise customer is roughly 40x as valuable as a non-enterprise customers.
In addition, the revenue from these enterprise customers haven’t even hit MNDY’s income statement yet - enterprise customers take several months to ramp and you don’t land 100% at the beginning (unlike a 10 person startup where it’s land and done).
In addition, the enterprise opportunity is super early.
From its conference call, we know that its largest deal is about 7,000 seats with a $1 mil ARR. Do we know what’s the average number of employees in a F500 company? 60,000 employees. Granted not every employee needs a MNDY product but it is quite clear the enterprise opportunity is in its infancy.
So right now, we have a winner in the enterprise space who is only barely scratching the surface of the opportunity. Let’s not over-focus on an ad and miss the forest for the trees.