PLG RISING 40
Creating inbound leads through community appreciation and authentic brand touchpoints.
PLG RISING 40
Creating inbound leads through community appreciation and authentic brand touchpoints.
OpenView is a venture capital firm that invests in B2B software companies. They are known for coining the popular SaaS term Product-led Growth (PLG). Meg led their creative marketing efforts to increase brand awareness, grow trust, and build affinity within the startup community.
ABOUT THE CLIENT
THE GOAL + VALUE
By collecting award nominations for the PLG Rising 40 Awards, it gave OpenView a reason to connect with up and coming startups that they may want to invest in. Ideally the awards compelled people to be proud enough to share their victory on social media, growing awareness of OpenView's brand.
ABOUT THE CLIENT
OpenView is a venture capital firm that invests in B2B software companies. They are known for coining the popular SaaS term Product-led Growth (PLG). Meg led their creative marketing efforts to increase brand awareness, grow trust, and build affinity within the startup community.
THE GOAL + VALUE
By collecting award nominations for the PLG Rising 40 Awards, it gave OpenView a reason to connect with up and coming startups that they may want to invest in. Ideally the awards compelled people to be proud enough to share their victory on social media, growing awareness of OpenView's brand.
THE OPPORTUNITY
If OpenView wanted to truly celebrate this community, the awards had to feel important, special and unique in order for anyone to care. Distribution didn't need to be a dead end box to check, Meg realized that with the right experience the buzz from these awards could bring the community together and scale OpenView's affinity broader than just a one-off "congrats!" email.
THE APPROACH
When trying to make something special:
Understand their environment, their industry and show that you are part of this community who struggles with the same problems, reads the same things, and experiences life in a similar way. Making people feel seen is how you create meaningful connections and how you build trust at scale.
SPECIFIC CONTEXT
FAMILIAR UNEXPECTED
There's a reason every new movie is a remake. People like what they know and nostalgia is one hell of a drug that gives people the warm and fuzzies. However successful uses of nostalgia mimic satire writing in its AB structure.
A= Expected
B= Unexpected
A+ B = Delightful contrast
In this case, corporate tech awards were expected, but cool human-sounding tech awards were unexpected.
CONSIDERED
Everything from how we communicated with the winners to the assets themselves were designed to put the winner's experience first and make them feel special. We leveraged a compelling medium (motion graphics) and a known community platform (LinkedIn) to create delightful collaborative experience. This was achieved by asking ourselves:
How do we make it easy and exciting for winners to share their victory?
Understand their environment, their industry and show that you are part of this community who struggles with the same problems, reads the same things, and experiences life in a similar way. Making people feel seen is how you create meaningful connections and how you build trust at scale.
SPECIFIC CONTEXT
FAMILIAR UNEXPECTED
There's a reason every new movie is a remake. People like what they know and nostalgia is one hell of a drug that gives people the warm and fuzzies. However successful uses of nostalgia mimic satire writing in its AB structure.
A= Expected
B= Unexpected
A+ B = Delightful contrast
In this case, corporate tech awards were expected, but the visuals being inspired by the world outside of tech was the unexpected.
CONSIDERED
Everything from how we communicated with the winners to the assets themselves were designed to put the winner's experience first and make them feel special. We leveraged a compelling medium (motion graphics) and a known community platform (LinkedIn) to create delightful collaborative experience. This was achieved by asking ourselves:
How do we make it easy and exciting for winners to share their victory?
THE AWARD
3D Motion graphics logo created with Blender3D to appear on all promotional materials.
THE INSPIRATION
OpenView's most popular swag item was the PLG MTV sticker. From there the 80s/90s nostalgia led us to the MTV Movie Awards and thus, the golden popcorn trophy. Much like the rising stars of Hollywood, we thought the rising startups of SaaS deserved some recognition too.
THE WEBSITE LANDING PAGE
Every sentence on the page was an opportunity to delight the reader with insights in a specific tone that resonates with them. And yes, lots of movie puns.
WINNERS POSTER
Inspired by music festival posters, we wanted a singular image with all of the winners on it to post to OpenView's broadcast channels.
OpenView's most popular swag item was the PLG MTV sticker. From there the 80s/90s nostalgia led us to the MTV Movie Awards and thus, the golden popcorn. Much like the rising stars of Hollywood, we thought the rising startups of SaaS deserved some recognition too.
THE INSPIRATION
WINNERS POSTER
Inspired by music festival posters, we wanted a singular image with all of the winners on it to post to OpenView's broadcast channels.
Breaking the awards winners into categories allowed Meg to create a specific graphic for each group, making it feel more personalized without needing to create 60 company-specific graphics.
DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY
DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY
Breaking the awards winners into categories allowed Meg to create a specific graphic for each group, making it feel more personalized without needing to create 60 company-specific graphics.
Bringing together the community and achieving more than we set out to do.
THE IMPACT
Once winners received their awards they rushed to LinkedIn to share. A few even posted before the official launch out of pure excitement.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
OpenView saw an increase in LinkedIn followers as well as inbound leads for the investment team. Founders were reaching out to ask why they weren't included or find out how to nominate someone for the following year.
INBOUND INTEREST
Some winners put their golden popcorn award in their sales pitch decks or on their website as a certification for being experts in product-led growth.
INCREASED AUTHORITY
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Once winners received their awards they rushed to LinkedIn to share. A few even posted before the official launch out of pure excitement.
INBOUND INTEREST
OpenView saw an increase in LinkedIn followers as well as inbound leads for the investment team. Founders were reaching out to ask why they weren't included or find out how to nominate someone for the following year.
INCREASED AUTHORITY
Some winners put their golden popcorn award in their sales pitch decks or on their website as a certification for being experts in product-led growth.