Vimeo's first major brand campaign promises lots of help--but not with your body hair issues or dating fails

Life presents a cornucopia of challenges---awkward first dates, food fails, body grooming issues. And while content creation platform Vimeo admits it can do absolutely nothing to help you out in such situations--it promises to be your savior when you’re trying to make great video content. That’s the angle in the company’s largest-ever brand campaign to date, created out of New York agency Fig. The effort features more than a dozen quirky short-form videos depicting various tricky scenarios: a guy tries to wax his back hair on his own, another dude sits stiffly next to his date in a movie theater as another couple gets lusty nearby, a woman has condiment issues when trying to spice up her hot dog. After each, the films feature the tagline “Vimeo can help" punctuated by an asterisk. The notation is key since it signals an important disclaimer--that the platform can only assist “with your videos.” Vimeo CMO Harris Beber says that while most people see Vimeo as a viewing platform, the campaign aims to remind them that it offers a host of services to help creators optimize their content. “We needed a quick simple way to communicate that it’s a service with a variety of tools that help make your video better, publish it and get it seen,” he says. “‘Vimeo can help*’ is a dead simple way to land that message.” The goal is to get that message out not only to the creative community, but to businesses both small and large, as the importance of video marketing grows. “We’re building out our product offering so anyone--from filmmaker to a local business to a fortune 100 brand-- can create high-quality video at scale,” he says. The Vimeo community’s response to creator tools “ has fueled our tremendous growth over the past two years,” he adds. "Now we are leaning into that growth, and investing in expanding the awareness of Vimeo to a broader audience.” To direct the films, Vimeo and Fig tapped Alex Prager, an award-winning Vimeo creator and photographer known for her cinematic, meticulously-staged tableaux. “The plan from the beginning was to make a large number of short format, ‘quick hit’ films with few or no cuts,” says Fig CCO Scott Vitrone. “They were always talked about as moving posters. We also wanted them to have a strong visual point of view. Alex was the perfect choice. Her photography and film have a hyperreal quality which we liked for this campaign, but most importantly she really embraced the idea of telling these stories in their simplest form.” As a digitally-native company, Beber says that Vimeo has long marketed in digital and performance-based channels and will continue to do so, but this new effort represents is “first major investment in high-level awareness and brand marketing.” Along with the films, targeted outdoor ads running largely in New York, San Francisco and Chicago play on the “help” theme while also hyping Vimeo's offerings. An outdoor mural reads: “ Making a video? Vimeo can help? Paying $37 for parking? Vimeo cannot help.” A subway poster says, “Turn soul-crushing feedback into organized soul-crushing feedback.” There will also be cheeky preroll running on other video providers that reads, "This is an ad before your video. Vimeo does not have these." The campaign will be in market through May, while the next wave of ads will roll out in the fall.

Vimeo's first major brand campaign promises lots of help--but not with your body hair issues or dating fails

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