Settling Out-Of-Home First Keeps Campaign Ideas Intact Across Channels

A brand campaign can now run across broadcast, streaming, social feeds, and printed placements on the street at the same time. Each of those reaches people differently, and an idea that works in one doesn't always translate seamlessly into another. A film can spend its runtime letting two characters talk until the relationship between them is obvious. By contrast, a billboard gets one image, no dialogue, and a driver passing by sees it in a fleeting moment. For some agencies, that makes the billboard the first test an idea has to pass, settled before the film is written.

Spencer LaVallee is Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Gus, the New York creative strategy company he started in 2020 and whose clients include Spotify, Netflix, and the NBA. LaVallee served as Creative Director at FIG and, earlier, as a senior copywriter at Droga5. Jamie Domenici became Chief Marketing Officer of Klaviyo in 2023, where she markets a customer-relationship platform built for consumer brands. Gus was behind Klaviyo's Your Brand's Best Friend campaign this fall, with LaVallee as creative lead.

"With the runtime of a commercial, you've got a lot of moments to romance the idea. In something as hardworking as a static out-of-home, you need to communicate that idea instantly in a single frame, which required a lot more calculus in terms of what the absolute atomic unit of expressing your brand's best friend was," says LaVallee. The static out-of-home he describes is a printed billboard or transit poster: no motion, no sound, one frame. The idea it had to carry is Klaviyo as its customer's best friend, personified on screen by an actor. The "atomic unit" is the simplest image of two people a viewer would still recognize as friendship. Gus fixes it before the film gets written, with strategy and creative running as a single job.

Strategy and creative in one motion

Agencies usually run strategy first and creative second, with one team handing its thinking to the next, and LaVallee has experienced this in past work. "We think the best creative needs to be deeply strategic, and the best strategy should be able to very quickly turn the corner into a big creative platform," he explains. "You do this big strategy motion with a deck full of philosophy and charts and arrows, and then you hand it to the creative team and it becomes something dramatically different."

LaVallee calls what Gus produces a "creative operating system," one idea that makes the work easier for everyone who touches it. He tests early for what he calls "tonal flexibility," meaning the idea can change register for a broadcast spot or a social post without coming apart. "A modern big creative idea needs to work harder and show up in way more places and way more channels than ever before," he says. "If they're all echoing a single big idea in their own unique ways, it creates the consistency that helps you understand what a brand's about."

Klaviyo wanted the spot funny without the product getting lost in the joke, and the team went through several versions to ultimately get it right. "Many, many, many takes," says Domenici. "That's the art of a great campaign. You have to keep iterating to a place where you find a sweet spot."

Friendship in one frame

In the hero film, D'Arcy Carden plays Klaviyo itself opposite Leo, a marketing lead at BIG COAT, a fictional outerwear company. The two behave like old friends who happen to work together, building campaigns over a shared milkshake and settling customer questions during a competitive game of ping pong.

A printed placement carries no dialogue, so the team looked for poses a viewer would take for friendship on sight. "One of the things that really inspired us originally was just image searches of best friend poses, the classic ones, hanging with each other, doing high fives or wheelbarrowing each other," says LaVallee. "We were just having so much fun pulling all of these iconic poses that best friends would take together and share online. It felt so playful and instantaneous."

Gus auditioned several industries for that company before settling on coats, including skincare and energy drinks. Klaviyo kept asking whether the business on screen looked like one of its larger customers, and the product had to stay visible inside the comedy. "Really bringing in the business, but still having some fun with it, whether it was the name of the company, BIG COAT, or playing ping pong with many cell phones," notes Domenici. "Humor, cleverness, but not to the point that you misread what we were trying to get across."

The work, Klaviyo's first global brand campaign, runs this fall on NFL on CBS on Sundays in several major nationwide markets, alongside streaming and social placements and a partnership with the podcast Call Her Daddy. Digital activity also runs across the UK, France, Germany, Australia, and Singapore. Husband-and-wife duo WATTS directed the film, with campaign photography by O'Shane Howard. "The NFL on CBS is a great place to get a lot of eyeballs," says Domenici. "We've been working predominantly across many markets, but New York and LA, where we have a ton of customers and concentration."

Real places, real moments

Gus favors ideas that connect to something happening in the real world, and LaVallee argues that's worth more now that AI images are everywhere. "Real life moments, whether it be out-of-home or activations, I think are extremely important for growing brands," he says. "Especially in this world of AI, it's easy to question the images we see every day. Where did that come from? How was that produced? There's nothing to be questioned about something that's IRL, and you could feel and have a tangible experience with it."

Klaviyo already runs its own conference and exhibits at trade shows, and LaVallee works with clients on how often events like that should happen and what coverage they earn. "We always try to work with our partners to see if we can create a cadence of these moments, whether it be IRL or social, to have these earned media spikes and show up in cultural conversation," LaVallee adds. "That just feels like a way modern brands need to make sure they're staying top of mind and staying relevant."

Underneath the casting, the coats, and the media plan, Domenici traces everything back to a core claim about the product. "This whole campaign is about your best friend, and the pure essence of it is we want to make your life easier. We want to create technology that feels like it knows you, understands you, and works on behalf of you," she concludes. "Your best friend better be doing that or else you're in trouble. You need some new friends."