Iterable
Ditch the Cult
Quarterly campaign planning is secretly a cult.
Watch the full campaign · 1:19
The Strategy
Iterable makes the platform marketers use to send emails, texts and app messages to their customers. In 2025 it was launching a new way to use it, called Moments-Based Marketing. Instead of planning campaigns around a calendar and sending everyone the same message at once, a brand talks to each customer one at a time, at the moment it matters to them. Iterable called it the death of the campaign. The people it had to reach were marketing managers and email marketers, and most of them still live by the campaign calendar. That isn't because they can't picture something better. Writing to every customer one at a time has always felt impossible at scale.
Marketers already have a name for the old way: batch-and-blast. We first heard it from Iterable's own team, and the whole campaign grew out of that one phrase. When a team keeps doing something long after it stopped working, only because it's what they've always done, that isn't a strategy anymore. It's a ritual.
So the spot takes place in the supply closet. It's dim and cramped, and the shelves are packed with copy paper, old monitors and leftover trade-show swag. Behind the door, the marketing team has built a temple. Every robe and mask is made from something found around the office: tablecloths, bubble wrap, Post-its, paper plates, a paper bag. Their leader wears a crown of file folders and swings a smoking pencil cup on a lanyard. They sway around a glowing laptop and chant the same two words, over and over.
Out in the hallway, a new hire peers through the narrow window in the door. She's in mustard yellow, the one person in the building dressed in Iterable's colors. She checks her phone. The meeting on her calendar is Quarterly Campaign Planning, and it starts in one minute.
The 15-second teaser stops at the door. The 30-second hero sends her inside, the 15-second follow-up picks up once things calm down, and two short reminders go back to the closet one last time. Every spot was delivered for widescreen, vertical and square feeds, and every one points to DitchTheCult.com, a web address made just for the campaign. Iterable ran the ads itself, on LinkedIn, YouTube and streaming TV.
The Process
Before anyone wrote a script, we brought Iterable's team everything discovery turned up: who their buyers are, how rivals like Braze and Salesforce talk about themselves, and where Iterable's own message could get simpler. What they said at the end of that presentation is at the bottom of this page.
The Iterable team didn't want an ad that made AI promises. The real reason marketers batch-and-blast isn't a missing automation button. It's that talking to a hundred thousand customers one at a time is hard. So her pitch became the thing Iterable actually makes possible: real one-to-one conversations. The word "viral" came out for the same reason. Iterable doesn't make anything go viral, so the ads don't hint that it does.
We also argued among ourselves about the new hire. One note asked for more energy when she explains the better way. We kept her deadpan. She isn't selling anything. To her, this is just how marketing works, because she already uses Iterable.
The closet is a storage room at 35 Left Studios, dressed to look like the one down the hall from any corporate marketing team. Our production designer got a single brief for the costumes: a safe-for-work Eyes Wide Shut, built only from things you'd find in an office or its supply closet. And one cultist came from our own crew. The one with the toy xylophone was our producer at the time.
Everyone on set loved the moment the cult sweeps the shelves clear in protest. It was also the scene that took the most work, because every new take meant putting the whole closet back together first.
The Results
Iterable measured the campaign against its own earlier videos and shared the numbers with us that August. On streaming TV, the share of viewers who went on to visit Iterable's website jumped 267% in the first three days. It was still up 240% after a week and 46% after three weeks. On YouTube, the share of people who watched the ads roughly doubled, and the cost to reach a thousand people fell from $13.50 to $7.38. The campaign was also one of eight of ours in The Fifty 2025, Ad Club Colorado's yearly awards.
“I did not expect that value-add from this partnership… that’s like invaluable.”
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“I just want to say that was incredible, Dan. I did not expect to get that value-add from this partnership. But what you just presented, that’s like invaluable.”
Joey Ta Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Iterable267%
More website visits from streaming TV viewers in the first three days
Joey Ta, Iterable, post-campaign review with Video Brothers, 27 Aug 202551%
YouTube view rate, up from 25% for last year’s ad
Elizabeth Steele, Iterable, post-campaign review with Video Brothers, 27 Aug 2025
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