Every day it seems like there’s a new headline about misinformation wreaking havoc on society. Most believe it’s just a political or social issue. But brands also suffer at the hands of misinformation, thanks to third-party websites and unverified sources online. Hence, misinformation is a real business problem because it erodes trust between a brand and its customers.
That’s why at Yext, we want to help close the “trust gap” by enabling businesses to become the ultimate source of truth online. When their customers have questions, they should have the answers.
In our first-ever brand campaign, we wanted to shine a light on the problem of misinformation for businesses. But rather that take a serious or somber tone, we decided to take a humorous approach to how ridiculously wrong answers to everyday questions can sometimes be pretty believable.
We teamed up with legendary creative agency TBWA\Chiat\Day to create the character of Todd Munion: a living, breathing metaphor for unverified sources online that think they have all the answers. “The Man Without the Answers” video puts the character in various everyday settings where he interrupts people having conversations, or simply trying to eat a meal in peace, with outlandish – but somewhat believable – “facts”.
The idea was to create a persona that is highly relatable. Everyone knows someone like Todd Munion – he’s the guy at work, on the bus, or standing in line at Starbucks who has to chime in. He’s our antagonist, but an innocuous one who might be a little bit lovable. And we wanted to create ordinary situations where his “Toddsplaining” left people bemused – just like 3rd party websites or “online experts” often do when you’re seeking out information on the internet.
We launched the campaign across the following channels:
Paid Media: Search, Social, Display, OLV & CTV, DOOH, Digital, Mobile
Organic Social: A series of teaser images that led to the drop of the ad on the first day of ONWARD19, our annual conference. The teaser involved mysterious "misinformation" messages shared on Yext's Instagram and Twitter accounts.
Business Insider Two-Day Tech Takeover: Video marquees, display banners
Overall, the Todd Munion creative - featured across seven targeted paid media channels (Display, Online Video, Digital OOH, Connected TV, LinkedIn, Captivate, Business Insider) - drove 47M impressions, 12M video completions, 58K clicks to the Yext site, 85K site pageviews, and 2K site conversions YTD.
The impact led to...
An increase in brand awareness by 11%
Ad Age Editors’s Pick
CEO of TBWA\Chiat\Day (our creative agency) named our campaign #5 in the top 10 agency campaigns for the last decade (2010-2019).
January 2020 Results
Paid Media:
The Yext paid media campaign drove 25M impressions
Total completions of the Todd video increased by 461% from December to January: 9M video completes in Jan 2020, up from 1.6M in December 2019
Total clicks to the site and site engagement: clicks grew from 10.9K in December to 22.5K in January (+106%), along with site sessions (+181%) and pageviews (+161%).
LinkedIn: 257K impressions
Impressions of the Todd creative saw growth of 170% MoM, from 9.2M in December to 25M in January
Connected TV:
370K video completes
406K impressions
Business Insider 2-day Tech Takeover campaign (Jan 2020)
Drove 8.1M impressions, 20% more than the planned 6.75M
514K video completes
