Melton Littlepage is on a mission to make people care about online security. As chief marketing officer at 1Password, a company that offers secure password storage, he is focused on educating the public about the perils of Internet threats and the best ways to keep your family and your company safe.
“We’re in this crazy time. We’re all users of the internet. Everybody has a digital life. We’re all there and it’s unsafe to be there,” says Littlepage. “It’s disempowering to think that the very act of being online today could be creating a risk or a vulnerability. It shouldn’t be that way.”
“The reality of today is virtually everybody will be able to remember a password,” he continues. “They’ll use the same password over and over again. They’ll use the name of their kids, the street they grew up on, the name of their cat or dog. And if they don’t do that, they write down their passwords in a notebook or the notes app on their phone or store them in the browser on their device, which feels secure, but is unbelievably easy to steal.”
1Password has millions of users – both consumers and businesses – that use the tool to save all of their passwords in one encrypted place. Littlepage equates using a password security tool to wearing a seatbelt in a car.
“I’m a Gen Xer. I remember as a kid when we never wore seat belts. Then when seat belts started coming into Vogue, the driver would wear the seat belt, but nobody in the back seat would wear a seat belt. When it became a law, people bucked the law. Today, it’s unthinkable to be in a car without a seat belt,” explained Littlepage.
“We’re in that pre-seat belt era of Internet use today, where virtually everybody is using the Internet but most are not adopting this simple practice of clicking a seat belt, which is to have ridiculously strong passwords that are uncrackable,” he added. “A unique password for every website and stored in an encrypted vault that can only be unlocked with your face or a password, the 1Password. It’s just really simple. 1Password just brings the seatbelts to the table.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Littlepage to talk about online security, sports partnerships & how using 1Password is like wearing a seat belt. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How are you kind of getting this message out there?
We focus our marketing on the bad habits and the bad actors. We try to do it in a very disarming way. When people think about their personal cybersecurity, they tense up. It’s something that they have low knowledge or expertise. There’s a lot of uncertainty. It just creates a lot of anxiety and they don’t know what to do. We just try to simplify it for them using really simple videos and commercials that explain bad habits that lead to bad outcomes online.
We’ll talk about not reusing your passwords, not writing your passwords down in a notebook, not putting them in the notes app on your phone. We directly address the things that are the most common bad habits. It helps people not feel vulnerable. We try to educate in as simple a way as we can. We leave breadcrumbs that will bring them to the 1Password website or our app. Once you’re there, we have simple videos that explain the most common reasons that people experience a hack or a breach in their personal digital life and how to protect themselves against it.
Ultimately we make it simple to try our product for free with no obligation. If it works for them, then great, they’re protected and we have a customer. 1Password is transparent. You don’t know it’s there because it just automatically logs you into websites. The best security is the most simple security. If it’s so simple, you don’t even know it’s there and it’s giving you NSA level security for your personal life, then it’s a win-win.
How are you showing up in the marketplace?
There is a lot of interest in people looking to protect themselves online. They’ve either experienced a breach or a hack in their social media account or they receive a warning from their bank that says we’ve seen your passwords for sale on the dark web. But there’s some moment that catalyzes them to look for a solution. They’re actively in the market. We have demand capture marketing programs that are primarily built around search marketing. The CPC advertising, Google search and affiliates are able to capture that interest and funnel it towards our web experiences so somebody who is shopping can discover us, understand quickly that we’re number one in the market.
The other half of our marketing programs are going out and trying to reach the consumer community where they are susceptible or ready to hear that message. We do that in three main channels. We do commercial advertising on television and CTV. In those commercials, we try to reduce the pain and the problem and the solution down to a :30 or :15 seconds spot. YouTube is a great channel for us and things where people that are influential and have an audience. They trust them. They can tell the story of how they personally use 1Password and what it delivers to them in terms of security in their digital and professional life, but also attest to how easy it is and how transparent it is and how effective it is. People are going to trust who they trust a lot more than they’re going to trust a software brand. Podcasts are a great channel for us. Then we can integrate our ad and the influencer reference together, which is a nice one-two punch.
Can you talk about your approach to sports marketing?
We’re taking some big bets in sports marketing. We know that sports fans, whether they’re attending an event live or whether they’re watching on TV, are attending with their heart. When you’re a fan, it’s not rational. All of the research points to people that are fans of an athlete or a team or a league end up being pretty loyal to the brands that advertise with that athlete, team or league. We’ve certainly experienced that ourselves. We want to borrow some of the heart-led fanaticism that the fans have for that club that rubs off on our brand through an emotional connection.
Our buyers are buying with their heart. Their heart wants to feel safe. We have partnered with the Golden State Warriors. This has been a fantastic program. We get great reach in terms of our advertising in the arena for the people attending the games. And then for the fans watching on TV, our logo is imposed on the court and in great social media activation around that. They’re also the entire club that is a user of our product, which makes it really easy for them to tell their personal story, whether it’s the CIO of Golden State Warriors or the players and staff.
How have your past experiences at other companies helped shape your perspective in your current role?
There’s almost no company on the planet that is No. 1 in its category as a consumer app and No. 1 in its category as a B2B app. 1Password is the market leader in both. Other companies that are like that –Adobe,Google, Microsoft– is a household name. 1Password aspires to be a household name. We’re a little younger in our journey. But that’s our goal. Our mission is to make everybody’s life secure online, whether it’s for work or for play. We have to be a household name in order to reach a billion users of the Internet. Right now less than 20 million people use a password manager. We have to be a household name to put a dent in that. It’s an awesome opportunity for a CMO.
My background has been in very data driven demand creation marketing. And before that, I led product design and product management for software companies. It’s really the integration of those where you’re trying to create products that are ultra simple and then put an ultra simple story in front of an audience at the scale of tens or hundreds of millions. It’s a huge challenge.
