After 25 years in agencies, SimpliSafe was my first chance to build a brand from the inside. The challenges were many but among them was that of hiring the right people: agency-level talent willing to work inside a company that had done very little creative marketing before. That was the opportunity. Build a small in-house team with enough range, humility, and ambition to prove that “in-house” wasn’t a career death-wish.
Our team made alot if work in the 5 years I was there. I had left a great ad agency because I felt I needed to challenge myself. And I am happy to report that it was worth it.
Here’s a little of what we made along the way:
Protect
your Hygge
The ultimate benefit of home security is actually a feeling—a sense of calm, comfort, and sanctuary. “Peace of mind” comes to mind, though it may be one of the most overused expressions in advertising. For this seasonal campaign, we needed a way to make peace of mind more memorable. So we borrowed a Scandinavian expression that not only captures the warmth of the holiday season but also embodies this ultimate feeling: hygge. There’s also a natural synergy between the concept of hygge and SimpliSafe’s clean, BRAUN-esque, Dieter Rams–inspired product design, which emphasizes simplicity, functionality, and minimalism.
Direct Response
The Hygge campaign was my first real foray into direct-response television, which meant learning a medium with its own rules, rhythms, and a very unforgiving scoreboard. But it also felt like an opportunity to prove something I had always suspected: DR does not have to be bad to work. It still needs a clear offer, a reason to act, and the discipline to sell, but it can also have an idea, a tone, a point of view, and enough care in the execution that people do not feel like they are being yelled at by their television.
Paid social was where Hygge had a different job to do. The TV work gave us the world of Hygge, but social gave us the chance to play inside it — shorter bits, stranger angles, and more ways to turn a very specific feeling into something people might actually stop scrolling for. It also had to work, which meant balancing the soft, cozy absurdity of the campaign with the harder realities of offers, clicks, testing, and performance. The trick was not treating paid social like a smaller, cheaper version of the “real” campaign. It was its own thing, with its own rules, and if we did it right, its own charm.
Paid Social
The Rebrand
From the founder’s kitchen counter to a national direct-to-consumer brand with a growing retail presence in just over 10 years, SimpliSafe had earned the right to look a little better than it did. So we partnered with Pentagram — one of the greatest branding firms in the world — to help build a cleaner, brighter, more flexible visual identity.
But the part I’m just as proud of is what happened after the handoff. Because that is where a rebrand either becomes a living system or a very expensive PDF. This is also the power of hiring real talent for an in-house creative team. The work is not always as glamorous as agency life. There are more emails about Black Friday and Cyber Monday than anyone prepares you for. But when the people are good, the work does not fall off a cliff when the outside partner leaves the room.
Our small design team understood the assignment: take Pentagram’s lead, build on it, pretend we all worked for Eddie Opara, and make sure the brand kept getting better in the places where brands actually live.
In 2019, our in-house bantamweight creative squad was tasked with conceiving a campaign to build awareness of the SimpliSafe brand while driving performance marketing. So, we introduced the world to Robbert Larsen, a self-described “home security expert.” After all, who better to communicate the benefits of home security than someone who is “in the business,” so to speak? The campaign launched on television and online video, quickly becoming an instant success. By using traditional direct-response TV spots combined with short-form online videos, social video, and in-store video buys, the campaign saw immediate increases in site visits and unaided awareness. The fall of 2019 was one of the most successful selling periods in the company’s history.
Robbert Larsen
Fear is Everywhere
Super Bowl LIII. A collaboration with the good folks at Preacher in Austin, TX. Looking back now—considering what had yet to happen in the world and what we would all soon come to face—this spot was oddly prophetic. Just two short years later, sales of home-security systems would tick up at a rate never before seen as we all closed ourselves in and tried to create our own safe spaces.
A Social
Distancing
Sweater
Cut to 2020. People were filled with cabin fever after spending most of the year hunkered down, masked up, and six feet away from anyone they did not live with.
Vaccines were still a ways off for most people, but the holidays were here, and all anyone wanted to do was get together. As a company in the business of keeping people safe, SimpliSafe felt an obligation to encourage people to remain vigilant. We also knew the last thing anyone wanted was another lecture about maintaining safe distances.
So we worked with our partners at MullenLowe, who created an idea that took SimpliSafe’s motion-detection technology out of the home and brought it to a personal level — through an activation that was equal parts social commentary, product demonstration, and good humor.
Because sometimes the best way to help people feel a little less afraid is to give them something worth laughing about.
Vicious Bunnies
& Flatulent Fidos
As it turns out, quite a few people consider the family dog an adequate answer to their home security needs. So we thought Annual Pet Week was a great time to remind folks that home security should not be left to your hound, cat, or even your bad-tempered bunny. At the very least, you should augment their efforts with the number-one–rated home security system.
The
Protectors
People buy home security for all kinds of good reasons: to protect their homes, their families, their property, and the basic peace of mind that comes from knowing someone is watching out for them.
But some customers are protecting something with a life of its own. A family legacy. A neighborhood gathering place. A mission bigger than themselves. For this campaign, we told the stories of people whose need for protection went beyond the usual reasons.