A 100-year-old grandmother, Marina Prieto, was featured on billboards across Madrid to demonstrate the power of OOH advertising.
The best B2B campaigns of 2024 were infused with creativity and fresh new approaches, revitalizing what can often seem like a dull category. Using dry humor, music, color and captivating storytelling methods, these ads effectively show how each brand’s product or tool can help businesses achieve their goals.
Below are the top five B2B campaigns of 2024.
“The Office” and “Silicon Valley” actor Zach Woods brings his signature awkward style to a tongue-in-cheek ad for Atlassian’s Jira project management software, which, he says in the ad, is helping him and his team become unimaginably rich. Woods breaks the fourth wall to explain that, based on his interpretation of his “tech money royalty” contract with Atlassian, he’ll soon be swimming in cash for promoting the product—despite seeming to know little about it. In fact, he defines performance marketing as a sports drink.
While he has no idea what his team does, Woods suggests they are staying organized and meeting goals (to make him rich, of course) through Jira, as the voice-over intermittently interrupts him to offer clarity into the software. Through deadpan humor and a willingness to poke fun at its own industry’s get-rich-quick obsession, (as Woods puts it, “I’m going to be nips-deep in Jeffersons”) Atlassian creates a compelling and watchable case for Jira.
Enterprise content management software maker Hyland created a musically driven B2B campaign featuring Formula 1 Finnish racer Valtteri Bottas that uses technology to turn the feeling of racing into a song.
The campaign depicts Bottas hooked up to biometric measurement equipment to monitor his heart rate, brain activity, sweat production and other vitals as he drives. The data collected is then shared with music producers and composers, who blend it with sounds from the vehicle to create a song titled “Flight of the Valterri.”
This innovative approach brings the experience of racing to life sonically, using data insights and Hyland software to bridge the gap between the technical and the creative, while adding emotion to a typically emotionless category.
In a satirical series lampooning the industry, Teamwork.com portrays the typical advertising client in the worst possible light (and arguably, the most truthful).
The multi-episode series is played like a horror short, with “The Client” depicted as a villain who makes life an absolute nightmare for his agency. The second part of the series tells the client’s evil-origin story, while shorter videos on the brand’s website detail tales of impossible demands and last-minute changes.
With fun and exaggeration, Teamwork stands out in a crowded field by showing shops that it feels their pain, and offers them an appealing solution.
Spotify made a splash with a B2B sales pitch featuring a vibrant music video that bursts from a spreadsheet distributed to media planners.
“Spreadbeats” features a colorful little green character coded into cell E7 inside an Excel spreadsheet that explodes into a colorful journey across the page, set to a John Summit electronic track. The captivating music video was sent to brands and agencies (including Ad Age) in several markets during the first week of June, with a second page highlighting a sample Spotify Advertising media plan.
The campaign quickly gained attention and accolades, going on to win the Digital Craft Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity just a few days later.
Outdoor advertising company JCDecaux’s heartwarming “Meet Marina Prieto” campaign won the Creative B2B Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year, showcasing the power of out-of-home ads by turning a 100-year-old grandmother into a social media icon.
The company placed billboards of Prieto, a socially engaged elderly woman with just 28 followers at the time, throughout subway stations in Madrid. Prieto quickly became a social media celebrity, boasting more than 10,000 followers by the time of the Cannes Lions Festival.
The campaign effectively highlighted the value of a medium that has seen significant declines in investment in Spain over the years
