Building a Better Brand: ClickUp's Melissa Rosenthal on Creative Strategy and Standing Out
Key Takeaways
- Melissa was BuzzFeed's ninth employee, started as an intern, and worked up to running a global creative department of hundreds of people
- ClickUp's creative team went from three or four people to about 20 in under a year, built as an in-house agency that knows the product and can take risks
- The north star is making the brand feel human: talk to people as people, even in B2B, instead of only pushing features
- Billboards work because you can't skip them, bots can't inflate their views, you can target by location, and they make a company look enormous
- Melissa blocks calendar time morning, afternoon, and night to read tweets; Slack and Sprout help, but the real coordination is people who care
- An in-house video team lets ClickUp test ad variations and iterate the next day, and Zeb is aligned on building a brand for 20 years, not three
Gray MacKenzie hosts Melissa Rosenthal, Chief Creative Officer at ClickUp, about nine months into the job when this was recorded and a year after Gray’s conversation with ClickUp CEO Zeb Evans. Melissa covers her path from BuzzFeed to ClickUp, building the creative team, why ClickUp buys billboards, how the team handles Twitter, and working with Zeb on big bets.
From BuzzFeed’s ninth employee to ClickUp
Gray asked for the career background first.
I started at BuzzFeed very early. I was the ninth employee there, so it was kind of like the Wild West of the internet days… But I believed in it as the future of media. So I joined as an intern, actually, and worked my way up to overseeing the global creative department: hundreds of people globally. We expanded into different countries. It was an amazing and wild ride.
She called it her crash course in marketing. After BuzzFeed she went to Cheddar, built it, and sold it, and was building a small SaaS company with her husband when ClickUp reached out. She’d worked in pretty much every project management program and had frustrations with all of them, so a company solving that problem looked like a rocket ship.
The north star: make the brand feel human
When Melissa joined, the creative team was three or four people. By this conversation it was about 20, built as an in-house creative agency: a team that knows the product, sees the KPIs on everything it makes, and can take risks. She and Zeb aligned on the vision from the start.
Making this brand feel human and personifying the product, and not just pushing features, but talking to people as they are people… Even in a B2B model, the best type of branding is when you’re speaking to people. So with a consumer approach, the north star is to make the brand feel human, and every touch point that a person has or business has feels that way.
How does she measure it? Social listening, but it’s never one team. Customer service, product, marketing, and engineering all have to be best in class before people name you in sales meetings as the standard. The signals: people writing in about support, searching for the ads on purpose, or telling their boss about a billboard.
Why ClickUp buys billboards
Gray said the two things he hears most from agency owners are “ClickUp has billboards everywhere” and the Return to Work video series. Melissa said it’s about equal now. The video team pitched the series, and she saw a cultural moment: ClickUp can’t fix the awkwardness of going back to the office, so it offered to handle the productivity side and give people a laugh. On out-of-home, she’s been a believer for years.
I’m a huge believer in out-of-home. I always have been. A type of advertising that you can’t skip, you can’t have automated by bots for views, and you are able to hyper-target based on where you want to be and who’s around that area, I think it’s just super powerful. And it makes you look enormous. So it’s a touch point on a customer journey, but I’m a big fan of the medium.
Twitter gets calendar time three times a day
Gray had noticed that Melissa, Chris, Zeb, and others at ClickUp jump into social conversations personally, often before support gets there. He asked how that’s coordinated. A Slack channel helps, she said, but mostly it’s people who care.
I block time on my calendar to go through tweets in the morning and then in the afternoon and then at night, and then I’ll check sporadically throughout the day… We use Sprout as our tool of choice, but it goes way beyond Sprout. A lot of the coordination is really just having me and the social team and Chris and Zeb just caring about the community, and not letting the size of the company influence our ability to step in and have those real interactions.
Twitter, she said, is where you listen and respond to real customers, and real employees jumping in is a point of differentiation. LinkedIn she likes as an organic media engine few companies use well.
In-house creative, next-day iteration, and a brand built for 20 years
Paid social had become a visible part of ClickUp’s go-to-market over the previous year. Gray asked how it was evolving.
With an in-house video team and creative team, we’re able to create ads pretty much in real time, test a ton of different variations, see what’s working, what’s not working, iterate on those ads next day, and then put them into market… Anyone can spend money, but few people can do it well. So it’s an art and a science, I would say.
Gray asked, as carefully as he could, how the relationship with Zeb and the exec team works when she’s pushing big ideas.
He believes in building brand, and building a strong brand and having that be your legacy. Because anyone can kind of do this, to acquire customers, but when you build a brand, you’re building a brand for 20 years and not a brand for the next three years. So we’re pretty well aligned there. And a lot of the sentiment has been, let’s take big bets and let’s make sure we’re measuring them and we’re iterating when we need to.
She compared it to BuzzFeed, where enough wins turned a company she had to explain into a household name, and she’s starting to see the same at ClickUp. Keeping the team in-house is what makes big bets affordable: no agency retainer or six-figure production bill between an idea and execution. Her closing note: “it’s always day one.”