That being said, the example ad shown in the article ("Slack is so last year. Now it's Ryver") just made me angry. Anyone who has been in tech a while has experienced this neurotic, senseless need to switch tooling every year because some middle manager decided to.
Like what Gett is doing: "We pay more than Uber!"
I think that's a pretty strong approach.
I suspect that said "neurotic, senseless need" to keep up with the corporate Joneses is what drove many organizations to adopt Slack in the first place. That leaves them feeling vulnerable about the next thing that might be coming up, which they don't want to miss out on. IMO Ryver is being rather clever by playing on that insecurity so openly.
The only killer feature I would have any interest in would be syndication across various communication tools.
And if the product sucked no one would use it which would be the ultimate slam against Ryver. But the opposite is true. Some Slack teams are converting and most because they like it better not just because it is free.
This is a smoking gun for in that you are only justifying your actions.
"Why do we keep running that ad, despite the occasional social media potshots ranging from snarky platitudes to frothing fanboy rage? It’s simple: That ad outperforms every other ad we have tested 5 to 1. "
That said, I think that running negative ads about your competition only shows weakness in a company. Don't use your marketing to tell me negative things about your competition, use it to tell me positive things about you. If you can't do that, then the problem isn't that Slack is bad, it's that Ryver is not strong enough to stand on it's own.