Common Room
Your Outreach, On Trial
A sales rep stands trial for crimes of lazy outreach.
Watch the full campaign · 1:17
The Strategy
Common Room helps sales teams find the people who are actually ready to buy. It watches for buying signals, like a visit to their website or a new job at a company they want to sell to. Then it works out who is behind them and tells reps who to reach out to, when, and what to say.
Common Room uses AI, but it does far more than write outreach messages. At the time, social feeds were full of AI claims that turned out to be little more than chatbots. Leading with AI risked making Common Room look like one more of them. So we left AI out of the ads and put the problem on screen instead: lazy outreach, sent with no signal behind it.
The idea Common Room picked was Sales vs. The People. If your outreach were put on trial, you'd lose. So we put it on trial, in a courtroom drama played completely straight. The tagline is "Sell like you actually know them," and the ads send viewers to SellWithSignal.com.
There was a fair worry. The man on trial looks a lot like the people who buy Common Room: salespeople. Their leadership didn't want ads that sneered at their own customers, and neither did we. So before we wrote a single script, we recorded a walkthrough of the idea, and Common Room sent it to its own sales leaders with no setup. They loved it. The joke was never on the rep. It's on the playbook he was handed.
In the 15-second teaser, the prosecutor stands next to an old TV on a cart, showing the evidence: a message that starts with three emojis and "{First Name}, I also went to {Alma Mater}!" It was so poorly targeted it went to a competitor, who roasted it on LinkedIn. The courtroom gasps. The judge calls for order.
In the 30-second main spot, she reads more into the record: the subject line "Hope this email finds you well," and follow-ups four and seven, both "Just bumping this to the top of your inbox." A LinkedIn message about stalking someone's profile got one reply, in all caps: STOP.
The rep on the stand snaps: "That's the playbook!" Then he breaks down sobbing.
In the 15-second follow-up, the judge hands down the sentence: zero signal, "textbook spam-the-TAM" (blasting every company in the market), and "I hereby sentence you to brand marketing." Common Room asked whether that line picked on marketers, who buy Common Room too. We kept it. Every sales rep and every marketer knows the rivalry. The dig is the joke, and his howl of "NO!" sells it.
The Process
We shot all five spots in one day, on a Sunday in August 2025, in a real municipal courtroom in the Denver area that was closed for the day. Brian, from our team, directed. Real courtrooms today are plain rooms, not the wood-paneled sets you see on TV, so we lit it darker and moodier than the room's own lights.
The old TV on a cart was a choice. Today's courtrooms use big flat screens, which are hard to fit in a shot next to a person. A boxy TV on a metal cart fits beside the prosecutor, and everyone remembers one from school.
The prosecutor wears green, Common Room's color, because she stands in for Common Room. The rep wears maroon, with no green anywhere on him. The judge's lace collar is a nod to Judge Judy. Look closely and the seal on the wall reads Common Room Court, and the judge's nameplate says Hon. N. Trusion. The crowd in the gallery was a mix of extras, our crew and people from our team.
The police officers are real. They were stationed at the courthouse that day, since a closed court can't have a film crew wandering around unsupervised. They were happy to join in, and they did a great job hauling our rep out of the courtroom.
We delivered a 30-second main spot, two 15-second ads, and 8- and 6-second reminders, in widescreen, square and vertical, with and without subtitles. Common Room ran its own media.
In July 2026, Common Room was acquired by Zoom.
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