• by Colin Kirkland , January 2, 2024

Slack, a collaborative workplace platform acquired by Salesforce in 2021, is entering the new year with a slew of features focused on streamlining productivity via generative AI, especially when it comes to meetings. To highlight the company’s latest features, Slack has launched an ad that takes the form of musical comedy.

“The Big Meeting,” created by Brand New School -- a creative design and production studio that specializes in commercials and branded visual content -- features a sales team that uses Slack to prepare for a customer meeting.

While the main character goes about gathering materials -- complex graphs, files, emails, professional-grade lighting, water (“still and sparkling”) etc. -- his co-workers prepare for the meeting with Slack.

“It's a meeting, a big meeting, and we’ve got no time to spare,” sings the main character, as he dances across an aisle of desks. “We should probably have a meeting about having a meeting to make sure we’re all prepared.”

“Or we could just have it on Slack,” his colleague replies.

“When they said they wanted to focus on productivity, we identified early on that there is a misconception that peak productivity requires non-stop work,” says Creative Director Brand New School's Chris Dooley, who directed and co-wrote the film. “Based on this insight, we pitched a musical that playfully illustrates the fallacy of constant work leading to optimal productivity, and Slack was on board with it.”

The ad attempts to break free from Slack's “misassociation as just a direct message tool” by rebranding itself as an AI-powered productivity platform, weaving in information about the platform’s newest product features, including AI-summarization and collaborative file-sharing.

The film “brings to life how features like automation, search, and integrations reduce busywork while improving team collaboration -- all through a whimsical spirit true to Slack,” adds Colin McRae, vice president of global brand marketing and creative strategy at Slack.

Slack and Brand New School capture this idea with the tagline “productivity without the big production.”

The ad aligns with what Slack’s Senior Vice President of Research and Analytics Christina Janzer recently told Business Insider -- that one of the biggest challenges workers currently face is balancing their time around meetings.

“We're focused on the quality of time that we're spending at work and how we can make sure people are structuring their day so they have the right ratio of meetings to focus time and they're taking breaks,” she said, adding that generative AI is a promising solution.

“Imagine if you can rely on a really nice summarization from AI where it summarizes the meeting for you,” Janzer said. “You have a five-minute recap that you can catch up on, and you save that whole hour of meeting time to then focus instead.”