ZoomInfo partnered with ad agency Colossus in 2023 to launch its first-ever integrated brand campaign, applying a B2C creative playbook to reposition its
ARCHIVEZoomInfo Bets on a B2C Playbook to Redefine B2B Go-to-Market
ZoomInfo launched its first-ever integrated brand campaign on July 10, 2023, partnering with Boston-based independent agency Colossus to reposition the go-to-market platform across video, audio, digital, social, CTV, podcast, and high-impact publisher placements under the creative platform "How Business Goes to Market" and the advertising promise "Win Faster."
ZoomInfo is a NASDAQ-listed go-to-market platform founded in 2007 by Henry Schuck under the name DiscoverOrg. Over the following decade and a half, the company evolved from a B2B contact-data resource familiar to salespeople into a broader technology stack designed to serve every function involved in taking a product to market. Despite accumulating a customer base of 35,000 organisations, the company recognised that the depth and breadth of its platform remained poorly understood even among buyers actively shopping the category. The 2023 campaign was conceived to fix that problem at scale.
In the United States, where the campaign ran, the brief called for something genuinely unusual in enterprise software advertising: a B2C creative sensibility applied deliberately to a B2B product. Rather than leading with feature specifications or integration diagrams, the campaign used fast-paced editing, culturally relevant references, and concise writing to deliver a single, clear message — ZoomInfo helps businesses unlock insights, engage customers, and win faster. The work comprised three 30-second spots, three 15-second spots, and a full suite of audio, digital, custom-content, social, CTV, podcast, and high-impact publisher placements, making it the most comprehensive brand-building effort the company had ever undertaken. ZoomInfo CMO Bryan Law described the campaign as an opportunity to "build a distinct identity that cuts through the clutter and cement our status as the go-to-market category leader," according to Ir Zoominfo. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 57 out of 100.
ARCHIVEZoomInfo identified a persistent gap between product reality and market perception. The company's platform had expanded well beyond sales intelligence, yet its positioning had not kept pace with that evolution, leaving the full product portfolio effectively invisible to a significant portion of its addressable audience.
The strategic insight driving the 2023 campaign was that B2B software buyers respond to clarity and cultural relevance just as consumer audiences do — a premise that runs counter to the conventional enterprise marketing approach of leading with technical depth. Colossus, whose prior work in the data and technology category includes campaigns for athenahealth, epocrates, and Toast, was selected precisely because of its ability to translate complex platform value into accessible brand language, according to wearecolossus.com. The campaign's overarching message addressed the age-old tension between sales and marketing teams, positioning ZoomInfo as the platform capable of aligning both functions under a single go-to-market motion.
In the United States, the sales intelligence and go-to-market software market represented a significant and expanding competitive environment in 2023. The global market for B2B contact data and go-to-market software was estimated to reach between approximately 3.37 billion and 3.7 billion dollars in 2023, according to gminsights.com and businesswire.com, with annual growth projected at between ten and eleven percent through the early 2030s. ZoomInfo competes directly with platforms including LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which benefits from first-party professional network data, and Apollo.io, which has pursued aggressive pricing strategies to capture mid-market buyers. Against 52 direct competitors tracked in the account-based marketing category, ZoomInfo recorded a market-share growth of 25.81 percent during the campaign period, according to clapboard.com. The strategic decision to run a broad-reach integrated campaign — rather than relying solely on performance marketing — reflected a deliberate effort to build the kind of brand salience that lower-funnel tactics alone cannot generate.
Colossus built the campaign's creative execution on a deliberate rejection of enterprise software advertising norms. The work is fast-paced, tonally light, and visually immediate — qualities associated far more readily with consumer packaged goods or direct-to-consumer brands than with B2B technology platforms operating in the United States market.
The creative team responsible for the campaign included Travis Robertson serving as executive creative director for art, a distinction that signals the campaign's strong visual orientation from the outset. Jonathan Balck, founder and managing director of Colossus, described the strategic goal as simplifying the message away from technical complexity and toward something a broader professional audience could immediately grasp and remember, according to wearecolossus.com. That simplification is visible in every executional choice: the spots avoid jargon, resist the temptation to enumerate features, and instead anchor on a single competitive idea — that ZoomInfo is the platform through which business goes to market.
The production approach favoured the kind of culturally relevant references and editing rhythms more commonly associated with the performance genre of digital advertising, where attention is scarce and the penalty for losing a viewer is immediate. Three 30-second spots and three 15-second spots formed the video spine of the campaign, supported by audio units designed for podcast and streaming environments, digital display, custom content integrations, social formats, and CTV placements. The decision to extend across that many channels simultaneously was itself a creative and logistical commitment — it required that the core brand idea be elastic enough to translate across formats with very different audience expectations and viewing contexts. The campaign's visual identity work, also developed through the Colossus partnership, was designed to make ZoomInfo's brand presence more distinctive and consistent across every touchpoint, according to ir.zoominfo.com.
ZoomInfo's 2023 integrated brand campaign generated measurable performance results across several tracked metrics. The campaign achieved a video completion rate of 77.75 percent, exceeding Podsights benchmarks, according to clapboard.com. On YouTube, the campaign recorded a 65 percent completion rate, described as approximately double the industry average, also according to clapboard.com. Creative performance reached a level characterised as fifteen times above established creative benchmarks, though the methodology and comparison population underlying that figure are not defined in publicly available documentation, per clapboard.com.
In the account-based marketing category, ZoomInfo recorded a market-share growth of 25.81 percent measured against 52 direct competitors during the campaign period, according to clapboard.com. No verified published figures for sales lift, revenue change, lead volume, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, or brand-tracking movement are publicly available for this campaign.
The structural design of the campaign, however, offers meaningful insight into its likely effectiveness. Deploying a genuinely integrated campaign — spanning CTV, podcast, digital, social, and high-impact publisher placements simultaneously — across the United States market creates the kind of multi-touchpoint frequency that brand-awareness research consistently links to improved recall and purchase consideration in enterprise software categories. The decision to apply a performance-genre creative sensibility to a brand-awareness objective was strategically coherent: it allowed ZoomInfo to borrow the attention mechanics of direct-response advertising while building longer-term category positioning. The campaign received no verified awards recognition at Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards, according to clapboard.com.
ZoomInfo launched its first-ever integrated brand campaign on July 10, 2023, in partnership with Boston-based agency Colossus. The campaign ran under the creative platform "How Business Goes to Market" with the advertising promise "Win Faster," spanning video, audio, CTV, podcast, digital, social, and high-impact publisher placements across the United States market.
Colossus, a Boston-based independent advertising agency, created the campaign. Colossus handled brand strategy, architecture, visual identity design, and all campaign creative. The agency's prior work in the data and technology category includes campaigns for athenahealth, epocrates, and Toast, according to wearecolossus.com.
ZoomInfo's campaign achieved a 77.75 percent video completion rate exceeding Podsights benchmarks and a 65 percent YouTube completion rate described as double the industry average, according to clapboard.com. The company also recorded 25.81 percent market-share growth in the ABM category against 52 direct competitors during the campaign period.
Bryan Law served as ZoomInfo's Chief Marketing Officer and principal campaign sponsor. Henry Schuck, ZoomInfo's founder and CEO, provided strategic direction. On the agency side, Jonathan Balck was Colossus founder and managing director, and Travis Robertson served as executive creative director for art on the campaign.
ZoomInfo applied a B2C playbook to cut through the technical, complexity-heavy messaging that dominates B2B software advertising. The strategy aimed to make ZoomInfo's expanded go-to-market platform legible to a broader audience, building brand salience beyond the sales-intelligence buyers who already knew the product, according to ir.zoominfo.com.
No verified awards recognition for the campaign has been found at Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards, according to clapboard.com. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 57 out of 100, reflecting solid execution within a category where creative ambition is not yet matched by measurable brand-tracking data.
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