Zoom wants to reintroduce itself, courtesy of SNL’s biggest stars

Kate McKinnon’s supervillain alter ego wants to destroy the productivity platform Zoom once and for all. Unfortunately, all of her minions need Zoom to do her bidding.

That’s the plot of Zoom’s latest ad, created in partnership with Colin Jost’s creative agency No Notes, which debuted on September 14. In the spot, McKinnon’s conniving character discovers all of the myriad uses for Zoom that make it so indispensable to her henchmen. The ad is the second installment of Zoom and No Notes’ campaign “Zoom Ahead,” which debuted via a spot starring Bowen Yang in December. 

Both ads use over-the-top comedy to poke at a deeper brand truth for Zoom: Most people know the company only as a video conferencing tool, while in reality, it has spent years expanding its services into other categories.

“A typical user has no idea that the breadth of the Zoom portfolio goes so much further,” says Kim Storin, Zoom’s CMO.

Since she joined Zoom in April 2025, Storin’s main goal has been to change that perception. Her team has been using new influencer partnerships and an ad campaign studded with former SNL stars to help break Zoom out of the digital meeting box.

Zoom’s brand problem

Zoom is grappling with a brand conundrum. The company doesn’t have an issue with getting itself in front of customers. In fact, it’s the opposite: According to a 2026 YouGov survey of about 2,500 Americans, Zoom has 99% brand awareness and recognition among people who use workplace communication tools. The problem is that most people associate Zoom only with its rise as a video conferencing platform during the pandemic, and not what it’s become today.

“It’s not surprising,” Storin says, “because everybody from your mom to Fortune 10 companies were using Zoom at that time for video conferencing.”

But that kind of awareness can go only so far, and it’s limiting for a company in the productivity space. To make a convincing value proposition to customers in the artificial intelligence era, it seems, productivity SaaS companies need to pitch themselves as experts in a wide variety of services rather than one niche field.

Notion, for example, has shifted from an app builder to an AI-powered workspace; Superhuman, formerly Grammarly, is no longer just a grammar fixer but rather an all-in-one productivity tool; and Calendly has jumped from owning the calendar to owning the entire work day. 

Zoom’s goal is to transition its identity from a video conferencing platform to an AI-powered toolkit for the workplace. Beyond facilitating meetings, the company has platforms for customer service, recruiting, employee engagement, and marketing for webinars and events. It has spent the last several years building out a suite of AI features and capabilities, including agentic search tools, a meeting notetaker, AI sales and design agents, and more. 

The idea, Storin says, is that Zoom can now take all the conversations you’re having—from internal meetings to external chats with clients and partners—and use AI to act on what’s discussed. That could mean generating a document, sending follow-up messages, or conducting research, for example. The challenge is conveying the shift to customers without sounding too corporate or preachy. 

That’s where Jost, Yang, and McKinnon come in.

How Zoom and Colin Jost are using humor to shift its identity

In the first iteration of Zoom and No Notes’ “Zoom Ahead” campaign, the former SNL cast member Yang plays an evil IT manager forcing his cubicle-bound underlings to download a “weird app” for virtual meetings. Then, in a twist à la the iconic Dead Poets Society scene, his employees begin jumping on their desks to take a stand. 

“I use Zoom!” one shouts. “I use Zoom AI companion!” another echoes. “I use Zoom Contact Center!” a third proclaims.

The spot is lighthearted and doesn’t take itself too seriously. According to Jeff Grosvenor, head of content at No Notes, Zoom’s instinct to lead with humor as it attempts to pivot its identity makes sense in a tech market that tends to overindex on seriousness.

He adds that Jost, who’s spent more than two decades at SNL, helps bring the cultural relevance and comedy chops that Zoom needs to stand out. “For a brand to have a self-deprecating sense of humor about themselves, be funny, and have a bit of a wink to what they’re selling—at the end of the day, that comedy breaks down walls,” Grosvenor says.

In the new spot featuring McKinnon, Grosvenor’s team took that combination of humor one step further. McKinnon embarks on a trippy journey wherein she learns that Zoom can manage unexpected tasks like customer service, booking doctors appointments, and managing invoices for small businesses (in this case, weirdly enough, a homemade hip-hop taxidermy business). At one point, McKinnon declares, “So you’re telling me that Zoom is the best way to accomplish anything—even its own destruction?”

In addition to the partnership with No Notes, Storin’s marketing team has been spreading the word about Zoom’s new identity through panel appearances at conferences like SXSW and Cannes. And, just last month, the brand introduced a program called “Zoombassadors,” which involves partnering with content creators in various niches (like fashion, beauty, and banking) who can share how they use Zoom to run their businesses.

So far, she says, these efforts are helping customers remember why they preferred Zoom over other platforms in the first place—and gently introducing them to new ways it might be useful. “I think we kind of lost our swagger a little bit after the pandemic, and it feels like we’ve got our swagger back now,” Storin says.

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