For B2B marketers, it’s all too easy to find yourself floating in what Claire Drumond calls the “sea of corporate blue.”
Whether it’s a polished brand aesthetic or the latest wave of AI-powered messaging, the challenge is: Everyone is saying the same thing.
The best way to stand out from this sea of sameness is getting back to our creative roots. Creative, experimental ideas, however, are the hardest to prove ROI with.
Claire runs product marketing for Jira, Trello, and the Teamwork Collection at Atlassian, and she found a way out of the blue. She and the team across Brand and Creative cast a sitcom actor in a brand campaign nobody had a playbook for internally, ran it across channels Atlassian had never tried, and watched it drive measurable brand lift, a sign-up bump, and a Webby finalist nod. (The same playbook is now running for the Teamwork Collection.)
We sat down with Claire to learn how she gets experimental, creative ideas funded — and how you can pull off the sameness escape.
Key takeaways:
- Build your own conviction before you build the pitch deck.
- Competitor benchmarks reframe the conversation faster than ROI projections.
- Treat your baseline as a promise to measure the same way later, so the win is provable.
- Experimental spend is easy to defend once you show the safe option is also a gamble.
The right-brain moment
Jira had a perception problem. Developers loved the brand, but others didn’t see it as a tool built for them.
They needed to expand beyond Jira’s developer roots without alienating the audience that already loved it.
So Claire cast Zach Woods, an actor from The Office and Silicon Valley, who was having a stranger, funnier second act online. He was doing exactly what Jira was doing: broadening how people saw him without abandoning who he was.
“It wasn't celebrity for the sake of celebrity,” says Claire. “It was somebody whose vibe fit our vibe, whose humor fit our humor.”
Things like taste and cultural awareness are the parts of marketing that don’t show up in attribution reports.
Claire’s instinct turned them into a campaign. The question was whether it would actually work.
What happened next, and what it proved
Casting Zach was one piece of a broader campaign called "It Starts With Jira," built to reach knowledge workers without leaving developers behind. The videos did that work online — reaching both developers who'd caught the Silicon Valley Scrum Easter egg, and newer audiences who might not know Jira yet.
Claire's team knew they couldn't outspend competitors, so alongside the video, they ran a separate play: Instead of buying impressions everywhere, they'd surround a specific audience at a specific moment.
Take HubSpot's INBOUND conference in Boston. Instead of dropping a few ads near the convention center, the team built a sequence of impressions around an attendee's entire journey — Jira on United's in-flight screens, in the jetway when you landed, in your Uber into the city, and on subway placements and out-of-home inventory throughout the city.
The strategy wasn't to blanket every surface. It was to surround a specific audience during a specific moment when they were primed to notice.
As Claire put it, “How do we capture them where they're paying the most attention?”
That's a different question than "How do we get more impressions?" And it led to a very different media plan.
The campaign delivered measurable lifts in brand awareness and perception among the audiences Atlassian wanted to reach. Jira sign-ups increased — not immediately, but roughly 2-3 months after launch, aligned with the timeline Claire had set internal expectations around.
The campaign became a Webby Award finalist.
"The Contract,” featuring Zach Woods on Jira for AtlassianThe same playbook is now running for the Atlassian Teamwork Collection, which is still in market.
Those are all good results, but the best one wasn’t on the dashboard. People on the team were sending the campaign to their parents. Most marketers ship a lot of campaigns (as you know), but very few are texting them to their mom.
Claire still had to convince leadership to invest in a campaign nobody at Atlassian had run before.
How to fund an idea you can't prove will work
"Trust me, this feels right" rarely survives an executive review. So before she pitched the creative, Claire built the business case around it.
#1: Lead with what your competitors are spending
According to Claire, the most compelling slide in the entire presentation wasn't the campaign concept, the creative, or the media plan.
It was competitor spend.
Her team pulled data showing how aggressively Monday.com and ClickUp were investing in brand, and where.
Seeing those numbers flipped the conversation almost immediately from “Should we spend money on brand?” to “Can we afford not to?”
Marketers often assume this data doesn't exist, Claire says. It does — you just have to go find it.
A side-by-side comparison of your investment versus your competitors' investments is more powerful than asking for budget in the abstract.
#2: Set a baseline everyone agrees with before you launch
Competitor spend explained the field Atlassian was playing in. Now Claire needed to show where Atlassian stood within that field.
Before launch, the team measured unaided brand awareness and share of mind among the audience they wanted to reach, backed by third-party perception rankings from sources like G2.
“All of those data points together show a pretty compelling story about where you are, where your competitors are, and where you need to be,” Claire says.
Before you can convince people that something needs to change, everyone has to agree on where you are today.
Plenty of marketers skip this step. Then, 6 months later, they're trying to prove success using whatever metric happens to be moving in the right direction.
Claire's advice was much simpler: measure before, measure after, and measure the same thing both times.
The baseline also made a hard ask easier: Funding experiments that might flop sounds reckless on its own, but responsible when you can show exactly where you stand.
#3: Frame the experiment as a project (not a side bet)
This was the hardest part to align on.
"I don't want to suggest that our marketing leadership or leaders at Atlassian don't see the value in brand advertising, because that's absolutely not the case," Claire says.
The campaign simply needed budget for channels Atlassian had never tried.
We didn't have a playbook to look back on and say, ‘We know that United works’ — we were one of the first to do that partnership at all, but we needed the flexibility to try that,
Her pitch: We've shown you the gap, we've shown you what competitors are spending, and we've shown you where we stand today. Now we need room to go somewhere none of us have been before.
#4: Set timeline expectations
COne more thing Claire built into the buy-in conversation: timeline expectations.
Sign-up lifts from the campaign appeared roughly 2-3 months after launch. Setting that expectation upfront meant the campaign wouldn't get pulled the moment the first-month dashboard looked flat.
That’s what happens when creative work gets room to breathe.
FAQ
How do I actually find competitor spend data?
Tools like Pathmatics, Semrush, and Kantar track paid media spend and placements across channels. LinkedIn's Ad Library shows you exactly what competitors are running. Industry reports from sources like WARC and Forrester often include category-level spend benchmarks. And if you have one, your media agency almost certainly has access to data you haven't asked for yet.
How do I know when a creative idea is actually good versus when I just like it?
First, pressure-test the fit. Claire's instinct on Zach Woods wasn't random. She could articulate exactly why he worked for both audiences, down to a specific TV detail developers would recognize. If you can't explain why the idea fits beyond “it feels right,” it probably isn't ready yet. Second, gut-check the problem. Does the creative idea solve the specific perception or awareness problem you defined? If the campaign could belong to any brand, it’s perfect for none of them.
What if leadership pulls the campaign early because results are slow?
This is exactly why timeline expectations belong in the buy-in conversation, not the post-launch debrief. Claire set the expectation that sign-up lifts would appear 2-3 months after launch, before the campaign ever went live. That single conversation is what prevents a flat first-month dashboard from becoming a reason to cut the budget. If you didn't set that expectation upfront, set it now.
