DocuSign’s ‘That Time I Screwed Up’ goes global with new local and international work from Hardhat
Digital contract company, DocuSign has taken its ‘That Time I Screwed Up’ series, part of the ‘Next time, DocuSign’ platform international, with a number of new influencer campaigns via Hardhat, supported by a new local rendition with Anthony Callea and Tim Campbell.
The initial campaign with Jules Lund, released in late 2021 has amassed over three million views on YouTube, with two new renditions coming out of the Singapore and Japan markets now.
The Singaporian edition features fashion designer Rachel Lim as well as actor, comedian and director Jack Neo, while the Japan campaign has comedian Yuji Ayabe. The former will also be pushed out across Hong Kong and the Philippines.
Regional head of marketing for DocuSign, Andrea Dixon told Mumbrella the company “went out on a limb” with the initial series, yet yielded some “fantastic results”, including over 27,000 accounts created initially.
“Now for us to create new accounts across the other regions, we saw this as a great opportunity to not only grow awareness but also to grow demand and create new DocuSign accounts in these emerging markets where DocuSign’s not as well recognised in.”
“There’s an appetite to roll this out across all international markets.”
Hardhat founder Dan Monheit said its a different case locally and internationally to the US, where DocuSign was founded and to ‘DocuSign’ is the generic category verb.
“Looking back, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but its a B2B business that is a serious business. It’s legal contracts, so for Andrea to get that endorsed was a big deal. There are awareness briefs and there are specific bottom-of-funnel conversion briefs. And so while we have had more than 20,000 new accounts created, that was like accidentally on purpose.”
Dixon agreed, as she added “we’re a company where our business is the legality of contracts, so as you can imagine, there’s not a huge risk appetite for us to test new things and to dip our toe into the awareness sphere.”
She said while phase one was leveraging business influencers, what they learned was they were trying to influence behaviours instead, and that was why Hardhat was engaged, “we loved the concept of the behavioural science behind us trying to change the status quo of paper-based contracts”.
“We saw the best success with the Jules Lund work, and we learned that tapping into the consumer audience, with a more human-to-human element worked best. And I think the humour helped too.”
Shifting to the not-so-business-focused approach and looking more at widely recognised individuals was a step change, both said, and that was how they landed with Campbell and Callea this time around.
The differences of creating an international campaign came to the fore for Hardhat and DocuSign, in particular, toning down ‘That Time I Screwed Up’ for the Asian market.
“There’s a lot of saving face in Asian culture and in Japan,” said Dixon. “‘That time I messed up’, it’s not so self-deprecating, while in Japan it is “the story I do not want to repeat again’.”
Even locally the line had to be toned down initially, as Dixon added it has evolved quite a bit from the original line Hardhat pitched to the DocuSign team.
“‘That time I screwed up’ was not the original line we pitched,” joked Monheit, “it was similar, but not exactly the same.”
“We were just happy that it got through at all. Sometimes the joy of pitching a new concept to a new client is you don’t understand what all the constraints are. So now that I know the business significantly better than I did then, I’m slightly horrified that we even put that on a slide at all.”
The new renditions feature other evolutions such as instead of scrunching up a piece of paper and throwing it at a camera, in Japan the scrunched-up paper is thrown over the shoulder rather than at the camera, which is less aggressive Dixon said.
It has been a process since just getting ‘screwed up’ across the line with her American counterparts said Dixon, but now Monheit said his agency doesn’t take for granted the faith that has been shown by the brand in letting it roll out the platform in new markets.
The new campaigns are now live in Australia, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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