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Skillshare CMO Lilian Guzmán Talks Skillshare's Growth And TV Ad Strategy

This week, Skillshare launched a new campaign featuring a number of celebrities not just endorsing the platform, but learning new skills along the way. In a new series of ads, actors Neil Patrick Harris and Olivia Wilde, producer Kenya Barris, and hip-hop star Ludacris pick up a variety of new hobbies like doodling, illustrated lettering, and photography.

Skillshare, which raised $66 million in Series D funding earlier this year, has seen rapid growth during the pandemic as people stuck at home have sought to take up new hobbies and learn new skills to stave off boredom and improve their resumes. In fact, CMO Lilian Guzmán says the company has doubled its total users since 2018 and now has around 12 million registered members.

Like many learning platforms, Skillshare has focused on online courses. However, it wasn’t always that way. When the company was founded, it was actually focused on in-person training around business and tech. But a few years ago, the team realize they were excelling in the creative space.

“We did not come into this with a hypothesis. It wasn’t like we were like, 'Let’s move to creativity,'” Guzmán says. “We genuinely just said we have evolved a lot since the last time we’ve taken stock in the market.”

As part of Skillshare’s strategy, Guzmán says the company has been releasing new themed campaigns each quarter. For Q3, it was “Expect the Unexpected” and for Q4 it’s “Look, I Made This For You," focused on the holiday season.

TV advertising is still a new thing for the startup, but it seems to be working. Guzmán says the company’s brand score jumped after running broadcast ads in January. And right ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic in March, Skillshare ran connected TV ads and saw brand score jump again.

“When we run TV, we see our brand awareness score jump," she says. "And the way that we do this is I’m not a big fan of let’s spend a ton of money on something. I’m more of an incrementalist. Let’s find some channels and spend enough that we can educate ourselves and then continue to go up and up and up.”

Guzmán adds: “The other day, I probably had 15 people reach out to me because our commercial ran during CNN’s [election] coverage on Tuesday, which is not something we had bought into, just programmatic TV—we got lucky.”

Last week, London-based WPP said it would merge Grey and AKQA into a single company called AKQA Group. With 6,000 people in 50 countries, it will create a “new network model,” according to the company. And on Tuesday, WPP announced yet another agency consolidation by folding Geometry into VMLY&R. In an interview with Forbes about the newly formed AKQA Group, WPP CEO Mark Read says “it is important for every company to have a growth trajectory.”