Stytch: “Go passwordless”

Nobody likes to have to enter in passwords to every different site, let alone try to remember their latest password that seems to change every month. Stytch, a developer platform for passwordless authentication, is telling people they can forget about forgetting passwords in its new “Go Passwordless” campaign.

The campaign, created by San Francisco ad agency Division of Labor, uses simple statements to capture our universal dissatisfaction with passwords, summed up with a rallying cry that let’s Stytch be the solution: Go passwordless.

The campaign uses out-of-home messaging to drive home its purpose of generating brand awareness in the Bay Area. Sentiments on the billboards, bus shelters and buses include “Forget Forgetting Passwords,” “The Entire Internet Needs a Password Reset,” and “The Most Secure Password is No Password.”

The witty and memorable creative copy and design were developed by Division of Labor. Stytch's financial partner, Brex, planned the OOH media placements to assure an omnipresence throughout business and residential neighborhoods popular with tech workers in San Francisco. The campaign launched on April 11 and will run for eight weeks.

The bus advertising features difficult-to-decipher headlines written in password-ish language. Drivers who pull up behind buses will stare at things like h8P@55w0rD5L1kETh15? The campaign also includes first-in-market executions, converting transit-shelter poster boxes into 3D creative installations highlighting the ridiculousness of writing down passwords on Post-it Notes. The Division of Labor team went to great lengths to create the Post-its for the installations. The agency created more than 5,000 Post-it Notes, with varying bad passwords, written in a range of different handwritings for authenticity and visual interest.

This is the first creative campaign for Stytch and the first work for the brand by Division of Labor, which was chosen for the campaign because of the agency’s past work and experience with OOH placements in San Francisco.

“We sell a product to developers and businesses—tools that make it easy to adopt passwordless authentication—but the problem we’re solving as a company is much more human. Everyone has some visceral experience dealing with the frustration or insecurity of passwords, and we wanted this campaign to strike that chord in San Francisco where many of these people also happen to be potential customers of our product,” said Reed McGinley-Stempel, co-founder and CEO of Stytch.