#DareToGrow

#DareToGrow was AdRoll’s first creative-led marketing campaign: brand-focused, top of funnel, and a direct extension of the 2018 rebrand. The businesses AdRoll serves are small, scrappy companies growing in ways product marketing can’t capture, so the bet was to put them on camera telling their own stories, unscripted, and back the videos with a full omnichannel push.

The framework

The piece that made it work before any camera rolled was the narrative framework. With our copywriter and art director, I hammered out a repeatable structure for the interviews: five beats, each tagged emotional or functional, so we knew which questions hunted for feeling and which for facts. Customers got the questions ahead of the shoot, so nobody was performing recall on camera.

Every interview was designed to cut into a long-form film, mid-length pieces for digital promotion, and short clips for ads. One framework made the volume feasible and the edits faster to cut. We walked out of every shoot feeling like we got it.

The interview

The problemEmotionalone specific moment, the emotional center of the story

The contextEmotional / Functionalwho the customer is and the circumstances

The howFunctionalthe action it prompted and the tools used

The whyEmotionalwhy the moment mattered to them

The outcomeFunctionalthe results

Cut three ways

Tier 1: long-form filmcampaign hub, events

Tier 2: mid-length cutsdigital promotion

Tier 3: short clipsweb and social ads

Fifteen videos, three regions

Most shoots ran at our Mission office in San Francisco, where I oversaw production alongside our art director and copywriter, with hired crews on camera and audio. The rest we shot around events in London and Sydney: our art director took London while I travelled to Sydney. The Sydney interviews happened at the top of the Sydney Tower Eye during a customer event we were hosting, and the only room available was a storage closet. We crammed in a backdrop, a two-person crew, each customer, and me, sitting on the floor asking questions and watching the monitors. The style of the videos saved us: no wide shots needed. Hectic, but some of the most fun I had during the whole campaign.

What shipped

Fifteen documentary-style videos across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, plus the landing pages, ads, and blog posts. The media plan behind them ran across a dozen channels, podcast sponsorships to direct mail to out-of-home, and totaled over 170 assets. Everything launched at DMEXCO in Cologne that September. Topo Designs and Sunski gave us some of our best-performing videos, and Claudio Lugli, a London shirtmaker, got excited enough to have custom shirts made with our campaign illustrations. The customers narrated everything themselves, so when the direct-to-consumer supercut needed a voiceover we never planned for, I recorded it myself in our semi-soundproofed edit room instead of ordering one.

adroll.com/stories

Outcome

#DareToGrow became AdRoll’s largest brand storytelling campaign, running as one visible part of a broader growth push. Activations rose alongside signups in the weeks after launch while per-account spend held flat: more customers, same quality.

The company’s numbers over the 35 days after launch, against the 35 days prior.

Team Staci Degagne · Giulianno Lopez · Stephen Fishman · Sara Roma · Alex Fletcher · Dave Malloure