Zoom Communications Inc. is a fascinating company in that it’s one of the few corporate technology brands that resonates with end users as well as information technology pros.

I’m aware of many instances where the IT organization was considering an alternate communications product but the demand from the user community was so strong that Zoom was purchased. Zoom’s ease of use made it the product of choice during the stay-at-home period of the pandemic and user loyalty grew from there.

Since then, Zoom has targeted much of its marketing at IT pros, but it’s going back to what has made it so unique with a new brand campaign, “Zoom Ahead.” Instead of targeting IT decision-makers, the company is putting its attention on the people who actually use the work platform. The concept for the campaign came out of customer research showing that everyday users still feel a strong connection to the platform, and Zoom sees that as something worth building on.

The first ad for the new campaign was developed with Colin Jost’s creative agency. “Saturday Night Live”‘s Bowen Yang anchors the humorous ad called “I Use Zoom!” and the ad itself feels like an SNL skit. Yang represents an IT-like figure asking people to download a complicated tool. But then the ad takes a turn, where Zoom frames the platform as something people choose because it’s simple and dependable, not just because IT picked it. It plays up how widely Zoom is used by office workers, business owners, and frontline staff.

“We’re not targeting IT buyers with this campaign. We’re actually looking to reach and engage the users,” Kimberly Storin, Zoom’s chief marketing office, said in a briefing with industry analysts. “These are the people that are making things happen every single day on Zoom. They are champions. They are change makers. It’s not about just speaking to them. We want to inspire them and empower them to speak up for the tools that help them work better and get more done.”

The ad also makes references to some of Zoom’s newer products, including AI Companion and its contact center tools. Those additions are intentional. Many still associate Zoom with meetings, particularly video. Yet the company wants this campaign to help broaden that view.

“This campaign is our reintroduction,” said Storin. “It’s a movement. What we’re trying to do is capture some iconic moments, tap into that cultural relevance. We gave it a comedic modern twist… like “Severance.” Ultimately, we feel it’s not only unexpected but also a little bit ridiculous, and it’s a reminder that Zoom is defined by the people who use it.”

The ad will debut on Dec. 31 during the College Football Playoffs and will appear again during the NFL Playoffs, the Golden Globes and the Super Bowl pre-show. It will continue to roll out across digital, social and out-of-home channels through 2026. Storin noted that more creative is planned for the spring, which shows this isn’t meant to be a short-term push.

Zoom sees the campaign as an opportunity to reset how people think about the company. It wants to bring the brand back into everyday conversation and highlight products many users don’t know about by using humor and references to pop culture. After all, users are the ones who historically have driven much of Zoom’s momentum.

It will be interesting to see where the company takes the campaign from here. While most of the communications vendors have stayed in their swim lanes, Zoom has ventured well outside it with home grown tools and acquisitions. To the surprise of many, me included, Zoom has added products such as e-mail and docs, two markets that industry watchers feel Microsoft’s stranglehold on is far too hard to break.

It has also added frontline worker capabilities with the acquisition of Workvivo as well as BrightHire, an AI-powered hiring platform and Bonsai, a small business management platform. This in addition to more traditional capabilities such as Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center.

With these moves, Zoom is attempting to disrupt not just communications but the way we work, and I believe this is the most misunderstood aspect of the company’s strategy. It didn’t build e-mail to be yet another e-mail client just like in didn’t build Docs to try to be a better word processor.

What Zoom wants is the data from e-mail, documents, hiring tools and the like, which can power Zoom AI Companion. In data sciences, there’s an axiom, “Good data leads to good insights,” and though that’s true, silos of data lead to fragmented insights and we have plenty of those. Zoom wants to be the hub of work, and the place users work in most of the day.

This is certainly an ambitious goal, but it’s nice to see a vendor try to achieve something big. I would look at Zoom Ahead as a starting point to get users to think about the product as the one they love for video, but long-term, one that can do so much more than they thought.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE

Photo: Zoom