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Taking Our Own Medicine

My role
Head of Brand Creative
Creative Direction, Strategy, Display Ads, Video Art Direction, Video Production, UI/UX Design

As Senior Director of Brand Creative at SurveyMonkey, I led the charge to reclaim our identity after a period of brand fragmentation. This wasn’t just a marketing campaign; it was a full-scale restoration of a flagship brand.

By weaving together a major brand campaign, a website overhaul, and a rigorous, data-driven creative strategy, we transformed SurveyMonkey from a "one-off utility" into a sophisticated, semi-enterprise SaaS platform.

Project Highlights

National brand awareness television campaign
UI/UX responsive design and optimization
Programmatic online digital awareness campaign
We kicked off this new era with a high-stakes brand campaign starring Giancarlo Esposito. The goal was simple but audacious: re-establish SurveyMonkey as a serious technology powerhouse. We moved away from the "free survey" perception and leaned into the authority and gravitas that a world-class platform deserves.

The Problem Statement

SurveyMonkey was having a full-blown identity crisis. The market saw us as a free, one-off solution with confusing pricing, and our brief rebrand to "Momentive" had failed to gain any real traction. This launch was a "full-court press" because we realized our SurveyMonkey brand was our most valuable asset, and it had been neglected.

We had to pivot from a fragmented corporate identity back to a unified, prosumer-targeted powerhouse.

We took over downtown San Francisco during NBA All Star Weekend

The Challenge

The soul of this work was a commitment to our own core product: listening. After a failed rebrand to Momentive and a complex M&A landscape with Zendesk, we took our own medicine. We looked at the brand equity we already held and realized that our customers loved SurveyMonkey for what we stood for: celebrating curiosity and making sure every voice is heard. We stopped trying to run from our heritage and instead started evolving it.

A single campaign or launch wouldn't do it alone. We needed to support a steady drumbeat of brand campaigns, product launches, customer events, and more. We weren't just an in-house creative team, we were a launch machine.

As part of this evolution, I elevated my role from a straight-forward "Head of Creative" focused on approving creative work to a cross-functional marketing leader, creating an "ego-free zone" between Engineering, Product, and Marketing.

My creative decision-making was fueled by data from our Brand Health Tracker. We identified four specific friction points in our perception- Simple, Generic, Unapproachable, and Untrustworthy- and used them as the North Star for our style goals.

Every choice in typography, color, and motion was a deliberate move to make the platform feel more premium, human, and authoritative, which not only anchored our work, but also gave vital transparency to our executive stakeholders.

Watch the year-end "Thank You" video sent to donors.

Key Takeaways

This "Launch Engine" methodology moved the needle on the metrics that matter most:

Brand Authority: Reverted the "generic" perception through high-impact talent partnerships and premium art direction.

Operational Velocity: By rebuilding the CMS and aligning cross-functional teams, we removed the blockers that had slowed down experimentation for years.

Platform Identity: Successfully re-established SurveyMonkey as both the flagship product and the primary corporate identity, paving the way for an enterprise-ready future.