When Kimberly Storin joined Zoom as chief marketing and communications officer in April 2025, she did her own research to learn what users thought of the brand. Storin said she discovered a strong affinity for Zoom compared to its competitors. Still, many of the platform’s features are not well known.
That insight inspired a campaign and commercial titled “Zoom Ahead,” created by Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost’s production company, and featuring former SNL cast member Bowen Yang. In the spot, Yang plays a tyrannical head of IT who is powerless to prevent employees from declaring their love of Zoom.
Zoom extended the theme of worker empowerment with an in-person activation: a Hard Stop Burger Shop pop-up in New York City on March 26-27. The idea was based on research the company conducted with Morning Consult that showed workers are skipping breaks or eating lunch at their desks.
In a video interview, Business Insider spoke with Storin about the strategy behind the campaign and why she’s such a fan of the company’s AI Companion tool.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
The biggest challenge Zoom has is that ultimately, we are a ubiquitous brand. We have 99% brand awareness, which is a bit of a double-edged sword.
What people don’t realize is the breadth and depth of our portfolio. They don’t realize we have a customer support platform, a marketing platform with events and webinars, a recruiting platform, or a sales platform.
Before I started at Zoom, I talked to about 50 of the company’s customers. Those customers told me, over and over again, about their affinity for the platform.
Then I went down this rabbit hole of Reddit and social media, and I kept seeing this theme in the conversations I didn’t see with any of our competitors — it was really anchored in this preference for the Zoom platform, the simplicity, the ease of use, the fact that Zoom just works.
That was the genesis, the nugget that really inspired our campaign. We wanted to start a revolution.
I had a chief information officer ask me, “Are you trying to encourage shadow IT?” And I said, “No, we’re actually trying to do the opposite.” We’re trying to encourage people to come out of the shadows and share their love for the platform in the ways that they’re sharing it on Reddit, social media, and in our customer satisfaction scores — and we want them to tell you.
Colin Jost was able to find the right humorous tone for the ad
Humor is hard for a brand. And to get humor right really requires people who understand comedy, who understand how humor can play a role in communication, and who can explain something in a way that a straight-faced ad really can’t. And so, of course, we wanted to tap into the best of the best.
Colin Jost really reflects the cultural zeitgeist in a lot of ways. Every single week, he’s writing comedy that resonates and stands up to the news of the week. We felt that with Zoom being such a cultural brand and part of so many people’s cultural experience, having somebody who understands humor in that way would really help elevate us.
So we brought in Colin and his team from his agency called No Notes Productions. They helped us understand a lot of different ways that we could leverage humor and heart to bring this product to life. Some of it was outrageous. Some of it was formulaic in terms of leveraging a celebrity.
Where we ended up landing, and what ended up testing really well with our customers, was this idea that we call “Dead Poets Society” meets “Severance.” It just really worked.
The AI Companion helps connect daily conversations to strategy
I don’t know how many folks are familiar with our AI Companion, but that is absolutely my favorite tool. The reason I love it so much is because I believe that so much of the data and the information that matters to us as executives happens in those conversations.
Unlike a traditional LLM like ChatGPT or Claude, which is really focused on external data, the beauty of Zoom AI Companion is that you can pull in all your meetings.
At the click of a button, you can build an agent that effectively taps into all of the conversations that you’ve had and is able to leverage those conversations to help you build a strategy or to help you build messaging.
Now that we have automated gestures, I often give a thumbs up at very inappropriate times because I’m a very hand-gesturing person. Sometimes I’ll do a hand gesture, and the next thing you know, I’ve got a thumbs up flying across the screen. So that’s my typical go-to embarrassing moment.
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