[adamw2k]

Surprised at Sales and Marketing expense given the low number of Enterprise (>$100k) contracts. Wonder what's baked in there beyond AE compensation? I don't see a whole lot of traditional advertising, but maybe it's out there?

[vonmoltke]

I know they bought one of the month-long ad campaigns in Penn[1], which could not have been cheap. I also see their ads in some subway stations.

[1] For those who don't frequent Penn Station in New York, the Hilton Corridor that cuts down the center of the station contains a few dozen billboards that represent pretty much the only non-public-service advertising in the station. Amtrak sells the entire lot of billboard space to one advertiser at a time, generally for about a month. Slack was up there a few months ago.

[cosmie]

They're doing quite a bit of TV advertising[1]. Production and flighting costs on commercials, at a global scale, isn't going to come cheaply.

[1] https://www.ispot.tv/brands/Zyh/slack/

[shostack]

Wish there were some data available on the efficacy of it for them. As a marketer, broadcast is always an interesting one to watch as budgets shift to digital.

[GordonS]

I wonder how effective TV advertising would really be for something relevant to such a small proportion of the population.

[cosmie]

Based on the commercial contents, they're targeting pretty much any white-collar employees. So the target population isn't as small as it appears at first glance.

Their operating model also leads to a pretty unique way of internal adoption. At my last company (a smaller one), we had a paid Slack account and it was our official means of internal communication.

At my current company, a large Fortune 100 company, email is still the predominant form of internal communications. With Skype and Teams available, but with a frustrating enough user experience that everyone falls back to email. But there are a lot of pockets that unofficially use Slack, with some using the paid form (and expensing it under their budget) and others using free ones. Our central IT is finally giving in looking at getting an official subscription to centralize usage under a single Slack account (for auditability, information security, employee attrition concerns, and ease of user support).

By targeting end users directly in those commercials and enabling internal adoption without interfacing with IT (i.e. free accounts, web app for those that can't install desktop apps, etc), they're able to gain adoption and momentum in a guerrilla fashion that snowballs into eventual enterprise contracts.

[mprev]

They're doing TV ads on national networks in the UK, which doesn't come cheap.

[notfromhere]

I've seen tons of outdoor ads from them on the L