Search Party
After leaving Wealthfront, I took on some consulting projects and was introduced to Yext, which needed help with a brand transformation.
B2B/enterprise brands hadn't naturally drawn me before — candidly, most felt pretty bland — but Yext stood out because of its Willy Wonka-esque founder and CEO, Howard Lerman, who loved storytelling and ran the business with real creative flair.
We hit it off immediately, and what I thought would be a short consulting gig turned into three years as CMO, doing some of my favorite work of my career.
Yext was founded in 2006 as the digital alternative to the Yellow Pages (the name is literally "next Yellow Pages" — get it?). It started by helping small and medium-sized businesses stay in control of their online information and became the gold standard in data knowledge management, which led to an IPO in 2017.
But Howard had a bigger ambition: to help every brand become as powerful a search engine as Google itself.
Google dominated search largely because the experience was just that good — but also because most business websites ran on outdated search technology that buried their own information. Howard wanted to fix that and create "perfect answers everywhere." So we repositioned Yext as The Answers Company and an AI search disruptor.
The goal was to make Yext an essential ingredient brand — sort of like "Intel Inside" — that makes digital search experiences superior. But if you build it, they won't necessarily come. In 2019, AI search wasn't the hot topic it is today. So we needed to make some noise.
Party Search like it’s 1999
Yext already had a relationship with a top global ad agency, so my first task was our debut campaign as the Answers Company. The agency's angle: misinformation is a business problem. Creative, entertaining, award-winning — and completely missed the mark, since most people associate "misinformation" with political content on Facebook and Twitter, not what we actually solved. Our sales team — the world's toughest critics — gave it a tepid reception, and we shelved it.
Time for a do-over, in-house. We knew our story better than anyone: we were a search company, not social-media vigilantes. Our solution drove real business outcomes, and we'd built a diagnostic tool showing brands exactly how bad they were at surfacing their own information. We just needed a hook.
We landed on good vs. evil. The villain: keyword search, a relic of Web 1.0, hopelessly behind the LLM and NLP advances every other part of the business had already adopted. The cost of that "evil" was real — fewer transactions, more support calls. The hero: Yext's AI search. Keyword search was stuck in 1999, which gave us our theme: Search made for today, not 1999.
We built a year-long, global, multi-phase campaign around that nostalgia hook.
Phase 1: Laying down tracks.
We redesigned the homepage and anchored everything around our ability to diagnose the “era” of a business’s website.
We also powered our claims with research, producing a white paper (The Curious Case of Keyword Search) and a new stump speech for Howard.
We also became the presenting sponsor of Vox Media's Land of the Giants podcast season on Google, writing branded segments with our Chief Data Officer, Christian Ward, about search — within a podcast about search.
Phase 2: Building Momentum
To start we created a series of witty video ads in-house comparing keyword search to dial-up modems, fax machines, and bowl cuts.
Then we truly went ‘90s with “old-school” print. But not just any magazine — in an effort to get to marketing leaders we targted AdWeek's CMO Awards issue, where we did a back-cover takeover with a sleeve insert replicating an AOL dial-up CD (ironically promoting keyword search).
Finally, a QR code led to a custom "Escape the '90s" choose-your-own-adventure game, and we took over the city of New York with ‘90s-trivia digital billboards. Lance Bass helped stir up buzz on Twitter, complete with frosted tips.
Phase three: Yext's first national TV campaign.
The concept: 90s technology — Cell Phone, Storage, Internet — reunites at their high school reunion, all looking sleek and modern now.
However, one classmate hasn't changed at all: Keyword Search.
He's a total loser, yet somehow still the most successful guy in the class because businesses keep buying him.
We teased the commercial with an AdWeek yearbook takeover, then launched a full digital yearbook with character backstories once the TV spot dropped.
(Fun fact: shot in the same LA gym as the Back to the Future prom scene.)
Phase four: 40 in-person "Reunion at the Search Bar" events.
After a year-plus of COVID isolation, we brought customers and prospects together around a literal search-bar-shaped drinks bar while Howard delivered his stump speech.
The results: the campaign drove real demand, and helped land Yext a "Cognitive Search Provider" spot in Forrester's Now Tech Report.
For our efforts, Yext won Brand of the Year at the Shorty Awards (alongside Duolingo and MTV), plus took home top honors for humor and multi-platform use.
But the best part was the team effort. Yes, marketing ran point, but it required buy-in and active participation across the whole organization. Amazing how quickly a company will bond when you ask them to go back to the ‘90s.
No Budget? No problem!
I'm often asked in interviews how big my budget was at previous companies. Size matters to some, I guess (hey-o!) — but the better question is how efficiently you use what you have. My answer: I've got a lot of experience doing a lot with a little. The 1999 campaign ran on a modest budget largely because we did nearly everything in-house.
Sometimes the purse strings got even tighter. COVID hit every business, and marketing budgets are usually first on the chopping block. For most teams, that's debilitating. For mine, it became a fun challenge.
One example: our "Season of Search" campaign, starring Yext employees in a homegrown ad to drive year-end business (when search traffic spikes for most companies). We rewrote 'Twas the Night Before Christmas — all about search — filmed it at Yext HQ, and our narrator, a talented sales exec, supplied his own tuxedo. Nearly no budget, real incremental revenue, and a great cultural moment for the company.
Another: the Yext Talks content platform, written, shot, and edited entirely in-house, starring our own execs as subject-matter experts. When we needed a voiceover artist, I gargled some hot water and lemon and did my best Don LaFontaine impression to become the voice of Yext.
From podcasts to product videos to national ad campaigns, we always found a way to create exceptional, award-winning, business-driving work — without breaking the bank.
Yext.gov
When COVID hit, we scrambled like every other business to figure out the damage — but a unique opportunity emerged: a chance to put our new AI-powered Answers solution to work in a crisis, and help in the process.
We quickly partnered with the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of State, the states of New Jersey and Alabama, and the City of South Bend, Indiana to build Yext-powered COVID-19 information hubs — symptoms, safety protocols, crisis-specific job postings — updated in real time as new information surfaced by the hour.
The pro bono work paid off in an unexpected way: many of our own customers were drowning in COVID-related questions too, so these public-sector partnerships became invaluable case studies and validation of our technology. It also unlocked a longer-term opportunity — a new public sector vertical, and a new sales team to go with it.
Turns out, in every crisis, there's an opportunity.
