Docusign
Drag. Drop. Send.
Dragging a signer’s name moves the real person.
Watch the full campaign · 0:54
The Strategy
Docusign didn't need anyone to learn its name. It needed the people who already use it every day to notice something new: a sender can now set the order people sign in, and change that order by dragging a name up the list. The people it had to reach send contracts all day, and they're used to shuffling signers around by hand to get one out the door in the right order. The brief asked for three things. Make those senders laugh, show how easy the feature is, and show how the contract finds each signer and confirms it's really them.
So the spot lives in two places. One is a home office, bright and simple: a sender at her desk and a contract that's ready to go. The other is the Docusign dream world, where the signers in her software are real people, each standing on a glowing platform and waiting their turn. Most of them are checking their phones. Yasu is sipping a cup of coffee. And David is wide-eyed and laughing, because he can't quite believe where he is. When she moves a name on her screen, the dream world has to rearrange itself to match.
The 30-second hero tells the whole story, and the 15-second and 6-second versions are cut straight from it. Each one was delivered for widescreen, vertical, square and 4:5 feeds, and Docusign ran them through its own distribution partners.
The Process
We knew Docusign's brand well before this started, so discovery went narrow and deep instead of wide: everything there was to know about one new feature. Docusign came in with the angle, drag and drop. We built the dream world around it.
The hard part was geography. This ad had to play in eight markets, in their own languages. So the spot was built to translate from the first draft. The office is minimal and Scandinavian, the kind of room that could be in any city. No prop on screen carries a readable English word. Docusign's own designers made the art on the office walls, and hid a few brand Easter eggs in it. Even the lunch changed. The script gave one signer a sandwich. On set it became a cup of coffee. That was easier to keep up take after take, and nobody in any market will think twice about it.
The dream world was built for real, not in a computer. Each signer stands on a platform with a clear plexiglass top and lights hidden inside, so the glow comes up from under their feet. The most fun part of the shoot was working with our stunt coordinator to fly the actors between positions on harnesses. Harness work is always a lot of fun and a little nerve-racking. Every lift needs safety tests first, then adjustments for each actor's weight and build, because they have to stay upright and barely sway for the moment to feel like magic.
Then came the languages. We tested using AI to change the actors' mouth movements to match new lines in each language. Frankly, it wasn't good enough yet, at least not within the budget. So we did it the straightforward way: real voice actors recorded the dubbed lines for every market. And after everything was finished, Docusign asked for one more change: flip the whole spot left to right, so the order of the line never gets confused between languages.
It took under two months to get from kickoff to the first delivery, with the dubbed versions two weeks behind.
The Reaction
“[Video Brothers] set an example in terms of what we expect from vendors.”
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“[Video Brothers] set an example in terms of what we expect from vendors; from their ability to guide us through this process to their excellent management of a project on a tight timeline.”
Emma Anson Brand & Creative Project Manager, DocuSignMore like this: the best B2B video ads · how we make them