Tech marketing is a unique beast, even for seasoned marketers. For this reason, marketers who are looking to help spread the word about promising tech companies (and their products and services), need to look at examples of modern-day success stories when putting together their campaigns. To help inspire these professionals, here are the top five tech marketing campaigns of all time:

1. WhatsApp’s Emotionally Intelligent Campaigns

Emotional connections are key to effective, impactful advertising campaigns. WhatsApp’s marketing team understood this when they began using emotional, user-driven stories to demonstrate what made their communication platform so special. Given that WhatsApp is by far the most wide-reaching communication app out there (since it’s used almost globally, even in 2023), they had plenty of heartwrenching, memorable, and inspiring stories to use for the bases of their advertising campaigns. If not for how successful WhatsApp’s approach became, the tech industry might be more reliant on goofier ad strategies (as they were in the 2000s). That being said, more humor-based and playful tech marketing campaigns have seen massive successes as well.

2. Alexa’s “Mind Reader” Campaign

Speaking of which, Amazon’s Alexa has been the center of many of the most impressive, unique, and groundbreaking tech marketing campaigns over the last few years. People even use branded bulk promotional merchandise campaigns in a way that beckons back to the “Mind Reader” campaign. The humor-focused “Mind Reader” ad campaign series found a fun way to showcase just how advanced Alexa’s algorithm-based communication programs are while making the brand synonymous with digital assistants. Easily surpassing competitors like Siri, Alexa has made its dominance in this area of the tech industry clear. As they continue to build on the success of the “Mind Reader” campaign, many tech marketing giants are still inspired by the way Amazon’s Alexa ads revolutionized the tech industry’s approach to marketing. The more humor-based approach of the ads, in particular, has been more popular since the “Mind Reader” ads were first launched.

3. Duolingo’s TikTok Marketing Push

Knowing where to advertise your tech company’s services is often just as important as how you advertise your tech company’s services. Duolingo’s recent massive success with advertising on TikTok is a great example of this premise in action. The quirky green owl mascot, paired with superstars like Dua Lipa, allowed TikTok to be completely barraged by Duolingo promotional content, and user-generated free advertising, for months on end. The trends, and impacts the Duolingo ads had on TikTok are still visible today. Given how TikTok can seem to transform overnight most days, this staying power becomes that much more impressive. People who worked on the infamous Duolingo TikTok marketing push campaign are now giants in the industry. Thankfully, inspired advertisers will be sure to follow in their footsteps, and use social media platforms in new and inventive ways for decades to come.

4. Samsung Taking on the iPhone 14’s Market

Many of the best tech marketing campaigns in the past decade have revolved around major tech competitors taking shots at one another. While this has sometimes proved disastrous for the company trash-talking a competitor, there are stories where this strategy has paid off big time. Samsungs efforts to directly confront Apple in the mobile device market is a great example of such a success story in action. With taglines like “What the flip, Apple?”, Samsung was able to tell customers about their devices’ superiority to the much more expensive Apple alternatives in a fun, creative fashion. Samsung also mimicked the hyper-sleek, simplistic design ethos of Apple to catch the eye of would-be Apple patrons creatively. Given how much more popular Samsung is becoming in the mobile market, there’s proof that its marketing strategies are absolutely working.

5. Reddit’s Hyper-Short 5-Second Super Bowl Ad

Reddit’s recent super bowl ads are the definition of “short and sweet.” The 5-second ad blitz made waves immediately after it aired, and has been endlessly copied in today’s tech advertising climate. Especially since more and more ad companies are focusing on how they can craft effective, bite-size advertisements that are less than 10 seconds long, this Reddit ad has proven to be monumentally influential. Anyone who is working in tech advertising in 2023 is sure to be intimately aware of, and inspired by, Reddit’s hyper-short 5-second super bowl ad, after all. Unless you want to feel left out of future conversations with fellow tech advertisers, you need to make sure you’ve closely studied what makes this uniquely short and stylish ad work. The glitch aesthetic, timing, and straightforward pitch of the 5-second Reddit super bowl ad are particularly noteworthy (and are sure to inspire tech advertisers in 2023, and beyond).