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Terminix CMO Alex Ho Talks About Humor In Marketing

This week, pest control company Terminix launched a new campaign around the extremes people go to ridding their homes of roaches and termites. But the Memphis-based business didn't use fear—it used humor.

According to Chief Marketing Officer Alex Ho, who joined Terminix last year after several years as the CMO of American Greetings, one of the most effective ways to promote a solution to a problem is to highlight the problem. The comedic route is a stark, but effective, difference from how the company once marketed exterminator services with CGI pest monsters.

“It was our feeling that in the past year with so many things that people can be afraid of and stressed about, pushing up against fear just wasn’t a good thing for mental health,” Ho says. “So we decided to turn it on its head and to say well, you can talk about a scary subject if you say it with a smile.”

The spots—available for viewing on the brand’s YouTube channel—also highlight the trend of marketers returning to comedy after a year spent largely avoiding the genre due to the pandemic. (Early signs of this could be seen in many of the ads aired during Super Bowl LV.)

“What I found out in all these years of marketing is that unless you’re speaking to consumers in the most relevant way, they’re likely to tune you out. And tuning out of course means a waste of money," says Ho. "Our goal was to connect with consumers in a way that’s most relevant to them.”

With a new valuation of $1.4 billion, the Series F round will be used for engineering, sales, international expansion and future acquisitions.