Super Bowl LVI Offers a Master Class in the Craft of the B2B Business Narrative

In the era where content is king in marketing and PR, many businesses understand the power and strategic importance of narrative storytelling in crafting conversion-generating messaging. 

Nevertheless, few companies — especially B2B companies — are able to execute original narrative content without allowing metrics and data to drown out the human elements of their brand. It’s for this reason that this year’s Super Bowl — the “Olympics” of the advertising industry — featured an upset not only on-field but on-screen: Israel-based SaaS company Monday.com stood out as an uncommon B2B player at the event traditionally dominated by the creative powerhouses of B2C advertising. 

In this article, I’ll dig into what made Monday.com’s debut Super Bowl performance stand out, focusing on three key tenets in the business narrative playbook often overlooked by B2B and B2C companies both.

Data doesn’t speak for itself in the game of the business narrative

Monday.com’s Super Bowl spot brings the creativity of B2C advertising to promoting the company’s cloud-based work OS platform. The ad is short but visually spectacular: in this seemingly average office, collaborations take a fantastical and futuristic turn as workers bring their ideas to life in more than three dimensions, aided by clones, holograms, and unhindered by the laws of physics. In the 30 seconds allotted to them, the SaaS company puts an imaginative spin on the promise offered by their no-code OS platform — “work without limits.”

What’s notable about these 30 seconds is actually what we don’t hear: the wealth of data available about, say, their $6.8 billion IPO or 95% increase in revenue, among the number of metrics the company has at their disposal to quantify the value of their service. In this way, the spot avoids the trap that so many other B2B companies fall into: failing to transform data-driven success stories into concrete terms meaningful to their audience. It’s tempting to lead with the power of raw numbers when making the case for your brand’s dominance. But framing this story primarily in terms of data can come across as wonkish: performance metrics alone are unlikely to resonate with your stakeholders’ interests and can leave them feeling cold.

By contrast, Monday.com’s spot effectively translates their vision of their product’s value into a simple and engaging visual metaphor. Through the colorful and gravity-defying visual representation of the dynamic collaborative work that can be done with their platform, the brand turns these critical 30 seconds into a story about their customers’ potential for success — one that actually makes the prospect of going back to work on Monday seem not just bearable but even fun. 

A targeted and intentional reach goes further than “empathy”

Monday.com’s business narrative stands out among B2B companies for the user-centric approach it takes in framing its value. This is no accident: the company is candid about the importance of the human element of their product in their brand identity. The Super Bowl spot reflects this approach to messaging, which makes the story of their work OS a human one: users are the main characters, their challenges and concerns the central conflict.

But the way the brand puts this into practice goes beyond the tendency we see so often of late: pumping messaging full of generic pathos as a stand-in for the empathetic, experience-focused branding so critical to reaching audiences today. Instead of relying on sentimental but vague appeals to the human essence of their product, Monday.com demonstrates a more genuine attentiveness to customer experience. This is apparent in the specificity of to whom they direct their messaging: not to the decision-makers in the C-suite but to the rank-and-file workers among the big game’s 30 million-viewer audience, the ones who stand to be the primary users and beneficiaries of their product.

With this kind of placement, Monday.com lays the ground for a more organic connection: the granular focus of their messaging understands that recognizing customer needs and experiences can itself foster brand affinity. In the game of the business narrative, more powerful than a half-hearted performance of empathy is a narrative that speaks directly to specific experiences and challenges of those who might be otherwise overlooked.

An engaging business narrative leaves space for the customer’s imagination 

A strong sense of brand identity is key to crafting a compelling business narrative. But the best representations of brand identity leave room for the customer to imagine how they fit into that identity. 

The most compelling stories are the ones that don’t have an ending but instead leave room for dialogue with listeners. Similarly, the story that Monday.com tells in their milestone Super Bowl ad appears as part of a longer journey: a short “making-of” video accompanying their Super Bowl debut frames the brand’s biggest campaign to date as part of an on-going story of growth for the company whose first video ad was made on a $50 budget. 

The brand’s take on the challenge of developing a game day spot — put together in four weeks, using their own no-code OS — doesn’t just showcase their product’s functionality. It’s also a part of the narrative of collaborative growth that links the brand’s story to its users: the OOH and interactive content that supplements the campaign acknowledges the influence of its customers in the success of the past eight years and makes it clear that the brand’s growth journey is one that moves forward with and through its customers.

Tl;dr

Even outside of their B2B status, Monday.com was already fighting an uphill battle in terms of messaging at the Super Bowl — on what is the biggest Sunday of the year for most Americans, who wants to be reminded that they have work tomorrow?

Nevertheless, the B2B company sets the bar high for those who come after: with their fluency in translating KPIs into comprehensible success stories, granular attention to audience, and cooperative framing of their brand’s narrative, Monday.com offers a performance B2B and B2C brands would do well to imitate.