Do you know what really makes your customers click?

Technology firms have a long and storied history with commercials. Just reading that sentence you’re probably already thinking about half-time Super Bowl commercials. Or annoying YouTube pre-rolls that leave you puzzled as to what the company actually does.

In fact there’s a whole genre of tech company videos that are so clichéd – fast edits, shiny happy people, repeated lines of script, emotional cues and images of bakers (think about it) – it’s become easy to poke fun at them. Why does creative advertising have to be so hard?

Earlier this year, Intercom decided to run an integrated marketing campaign that would speak to the value we can bring to sales and marketing teams. Our Demand Generation, Product Marketing and Brand Design teams collaborated to produce the messaging and our Brand Design team brought it to life. You might have seen our billboards on Route 101 in San Francisco, our digital signage at the airport in Austin, Texas or the display ads we ran on properties around the web.

The most recent element of the campaign were our video ads. Obviously, we didn’t run them as TV commercials but we took inspiration from TV’s 24-hour shopping networks. Embracing that “shitty-good aesthetic” led Kyle, one of our brand designers, to believe we could produce the commercials entirely in-house.

Which the Brand Design team did – soup to nuts. The voices you hear are Carly, one of our producers and Dani, one of our designers. Chelsea, our copywriter, was the hand model for the ouija video, while Liz, another designer featured in the rolodex ad. And as well as sourcing all the props, our studio manager, Jason, also acted in the bulk your button commercial.

If you want some inspiration for creating your own in-house ads, Kyle gives a glimpse into the process in this Twitter thread. In the meantime, here’s the results of our own efforts: