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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.

Host read ad on Trevor Noah's popular "What Now?" podcast

Key Takeaways

This in-house creative team "Launch Engine" methodology moved the needle on the metrics that matter most:

Brand Authority: Reverted the "generic" perception through premium art direction high-impact celebrity endorsements, like Conan O'Brien, Trevor Noah, and Giancarlo Esposito.

Operational Velocity: By rebuilding processes for how work gets done, revamping our CMS and aligning cross-functional teams, we removed the blockers that had slowed down iteration and experimentation for years.

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