Weebly Gets Hot Thanks To Creative Agency Heat

Every business and entrepreneur — whether it's the next Walmart or simply selling homemade crafts — needs a Web site these days, yet a majority don't believe it's possible to create a sophisticated-looking one on their own.

Web site building and hosting company Weebly was launched to service these individuals and over the past seven years has grown almost exclusively through word-of-mouth to include more than 25 million Web sites. Now the start-up is ramping up its marketing effort with its first national TV campaign.

The firm has hired Heat as its ad agency and earmarked $5 million for the new campaign.

"Our goal with this campaign is to encourage millions more people to start something with Weebly," says Kristin Proctor, VP of Marketing at Weebly. "Everyone agrees that a website is essential when starting a business. We did extensive research and found that 75% of people don't believe they can create a high-quality site on their own. So essentially there's a huge gap in awareness that this is possible and just how accessible it is to everyone. We want to change that and make Weebly a household name. A national buy is the best way to accomplish that.”

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Developed by creative agency Heat, the "We Believe" campaign highlights five business ideas started or inspired by Weebly users. Each line of the script is carefully crafted to touch on key themes, ingredients and beliefs when it comes to starting something of their own. Collectively, these sentiments are what Weebly users have taught executives about what it takes, culled through dozens of conversations about moving beyond tradition. For instance, one spot questions the lack of innovation around ice cubes.

Another asks why can't chefs put fried chicken in sushi?

Black-and-white colors are used to transition between the realm of ideas and reality, which is illustrated in color – ideas come to life in the form of Web sites that are shown how easy they are to design with the drag and drop creation on iPad app.

The ads will run on national cable — 60 different channels — along with online radio, with the same creative themes that will be supporting the TV.

The campaign also features integrated display ads that will run across a broad range of publishers and are designed to add a response layer to convert interest and awareness to traffic to Weebly.com.

Weebly selected Heat after a competitive review earlier this year. The San Francisco-based Weebly is now the first company backed by the Y-Combinator funding venture to launch a national TV campaign. Other Y-Combinator start-ups being Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit.

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