Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
I saw this relatively new television spot from Atlassian on the treadmill at Equinox this morning.
It provided some relief from the higher-frequency spots of the day like - "Were you injured at Camp Lejune?" and "Do you have restless leg syndrome also known as RLS?"
This one - titled "Impossible Alone, Possible Together" - makes a case that large organizations can act collectively and with intention if they use the right collaboration tools (like Jira, Confluence and Trello).
It opens with introductions to a few young folks walking separately, with a VO saying how valuable they are as individuals, before merging them into a large, synchronized group that is in motion.
This big team (pictured above) is choreographed to move like a giant marching band, except their motions all take the form of children's drawings (a rocket blasting off, a slice of pepperoni pizza, a winking smiley face).
The spot closes with the VO saying something like 'Accomplish everything that's impossible alone with Atlassian's collaboration software like Jira, Confluence, and Trello.'
What is Atlassian?
Atlassian is a Sydney-based "software software” company. That is, they create tools originally used to develop and manage enterprise software. Their best-known applications do dev-opsy things like issue tracking, work sharing and project management.
Nowadays Atlassian's customer base has expanded beyond tech as other industries have adopted the agile operating methods that started there.
Atlassian competes with companies like Asana, Monday.com, Salesforce and others.
Atlassian is not quite a household name yet, but the brand is well-known among software developers and agile operations people. Especially among their 250k or so customers.
That said, in Australia, Atlassian's founders (Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar) are properly famous. They are on a level like Page and Brin, or Jobs and Woz, here in the US.
Due to the nature of the current audience, the marketing is focused and low-key, but they do make an effort to be present and to head-off the downsides of being "a very boring software company" as the NYT called them recently.
Another one of Atlassian’s brand communications worth calling out is their podcast called Teamistry. Teamistry is about “the chemistry that exists between groups of people who team up to achieve more than they ever thought possible.” The shows hosts unpack this theme through entertaining interviews with small teams who have made good.
If you want to know more about about Atlassian's marketing and/or founders, please look here and here:
https://www.atlassian.com/impossible-alone
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/technology/atlassian-cannon-brookes-farquhar.html
