PagerDuty Brand Campaign: Solving Problems Before They Happen
The Challenge
PagerDuty operates behind the scenes of the modern internet, powering incident response for companies that can’t afford to go down. When systems work, no one notices. When they fail, the consequences are immediate and public. The category is both essential and invisible. Most buyers don’t think about incident response until something breaks, and by then it’s too late.
PagerDuty needed to make the value of proactive planning visible.
The Strategy
Instead of focusing on what happens during an outage, the campaign positioned PagerDuty as the system that prepares teams before anything goes wrong. The idea reframed incident response as something that starts long before the incident itself.
The message was simple: the best response is the one you’ve already planned. This turned PagerDuty from a tool used in crisis into a platform built for control.
Creative Platform
The campaign centered on the idea that real reliability isn’t reactive. It’s premeditated. Systems don’t fail unexpectedly. They fail unprepared. The creative made planning feel powerful and controlled. It positioned PagerDuty as the infrastructure behind that control. The tagline: Solutions before problems.
Execution
WEB COPY
We wrote and designed the website after we developed the campaign to ensure continuity between campaign messaging and online communications. It was a very collaborative process between the agency and the CMO literally sitting down together to work out the final draft.
The landing page was s imple scroll. The main messaged echoed the campaign message.
As viewers scrolled they learned more detail.
But copy and designed remained consistant with the campaign.
OUT OF HOME
Bold, irreverent headlines paired with colorful, graphic designs were unignorable around the Bay Area. Messages built context around the tagline, “Solutions before problems.”
Digital + Social
Digital and social placements extended the message to engineering, IT, and operations leaders, reinforcing the idea that preparation is the real differentiator. The work spoke to the pressure of responsibility and the value of foresight in high-stakes environments.
Results
The campaign helped shift perception of PagerDuty from a reactive incident tool to a proactive platform for operational readiness.
- Over 36 million total impressions in eight weeks.
- .12% click-thru rate
- Saw new users to the website increase by 21%.
Awareness expanded beyond core technical audiences, and the brand gained stronger recognition among enterprise decision-makers who increasingly see uptime as a business function, not just an engineering concern.
Why It Worked
Most companies think about failure in the moment it happens. PagerDuty owns the moment before. By focusing on anticipation instead of reaction, the campaign elevated the product from a response tool to a planning system. It aligned with how high-performing teams actually operate, not how marketing usually describes them.
The message wasn’t about fixing problems. It was about never being surprised by them.
About Division of Labor
Division of Labor is a San Francisco advertising agency specializing in brand and launch campaigns for companies operating in complex, technical categories. We help translate invisible systems into clear human value, turning infrastructure into something people can understand, trust, and prioritize. PagerDuty partnered with Division of Labor to show that the most important work happens before anything goes wrong.
Campaign Overview
PagerDuty partnered with Division of Labor to launch a brand campaign focused on proactive incident response and operational readiness. The work repositioned PagerDuty as a platform that helps teams plan for and prevent failures before they occur, building awareness and expanding its relevance across both technical and business audiences.
WANNA KNOW MORE?
-
More than 50% of the Fortune 500 companies use pager Duty but fewer than 5% of the country has heard of them. Is that a bad thing? Maybe not. It’s not like PagerDuty does anything particularly sexy that the whole world needs to know about. But if you’re in charge of the technology infrastructure of a company, PagerDuty is as sexy as it comes. Their systems, in conjunction with your systems, basically tell you about potential problems before they become problems. Maybe site traffic is increasing and will soon exceed capacity. PagerDuty sends a direct message to the exact person who can directly fix the problem. So the problem never happens and the engineers that don’t have to fix those problems can go on engineering. Division of Labor is an advertising agency in San Francisco that’s built to work with companies like PagerDuty. Startups that have grown and proven themselves and now want to tell the world.
-
Our favorite design firm is Collins. They do truly remarkable work on everything they touch. We knew PagerDuty was going to be a great client because they worked with Collins on their brand design. But when it came time for messaging, they turned to us here at Division of Labor because that’s what we do. I wish I could say we were as good at our craft as Collins is at the design craft, but I can’t. And on the Media side, we partnered with MediaSmith, a fantastic planning and buying firm here in San Francisco we’ve worked with before and will work with again.
-