LinkedIn’s ‘No One Knows What You Do’ teases the confused parents of B2B marketers
As marketers continue to throw around terms like SEO, CRM and more, their parents become increasingly bewildered. LinkedIn’s latest ad campaign playfully pokes fun at this generational disconnect.
B2B marketers around the world will recognize the struggle of getting their parents to understand their jobs.
‘No One Knows What You Do,’ LinkedIn’s new ad campaign released today, pokes lighthearted fun at this generational and technological divide while showcasing LinkedIn as an essential platform for marketing professionals.
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Two spots, titled ‘Cloud Sales’ and ‘Acronym Daughter,’ depict parents who are comically clueless about what their kids do for a living (and what B2B even means).
’Cloud Sales’ stars a bewildered mother who just can’t seem to grasp her child’s job in the digital realm, as she confuses “the cloud” with “clowns.”
Meanwhile, ’Acronym Daughter’ shows a father who struggles to understand what his daughter is saying as she rattles off industry terms like SEO and KPI. He fears that she has lost all faculties to articulate a sentence.
Both spots close with the message that although parents don’t often understand what their kids do, LinkedIn’s global professional community of a billion members does, reinforcing the idea that LinkedIn is “the place to B2B.”
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Jim Habig, vice-president of marketing, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, commented: “We’re particularly proud of this campaign since it feels like it strikes a chord with anyone who’s worked in B2B marketing. The difficulty of explaining what it is we actually do – which many of us will do around the holiday table – seems to be a shared experience. So we love how Maximum Effort took that insight and brought it to life in their characteristically tongue-in-cheek fashion and underlined how, on LinkedIn, you can find all the people who do, in fact, understand what you do.”
The two spots were produced by Ryan Reynolds’s agency, Maximum Effort.
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“For decades, my parents could not describe what I did beyond the single word ‘advertising.’” said George Dewey, president at Maximum Effort “As someone with job duties that parents couldn’t exactly nail, I have special empathy for B2B workers. We love this campaign because of its insight and its humanity. LinkedIn is the place for B2B exactly for the same reason they immediately embraced this campaign – they get it.”
The campaign will run in the US, UK and 16 additional markets across LinkedIn’s owned channels and paid media, connected TV and social platforms like Reddit.
It comes one week after The Drum hosted B2B Worldfest in London.
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