Challenge

be premium, be true

The challenge for each of the below static ads was that each must express the show's identity and story while maintaining the premium tone of the overall brand. As the agency in charge of STARZ’s lower funnel, we were responsible for upholding best creative practices for the Direct Response space. My strategy was to engage the user to encourage them to stop scrolling, while also serving the user a nugget of emotion that they may resonate with. The static ad type proved an effective way to convert high-intent users by exhibiting a specific theme or story element.

Before

After

my role

designer and Creative lead

When I joined Ampush LLC., I became the sole designer on the STARZ account and took ownership of all creative management for the partnership. My role required ownership over high-level strategy, partner-creative communications, and the execution of data-informed ad creative for various social platforms. My goal was to push the design and creative toward innovation while retaining the integrity of the brand across all platforms.

Team Structure: Two Growth Marketing Leads, 10 Growth Marketing Analysts, One Growth Marking Data Lead, and One Designer/Creative Lead.

testing framework

Creative & Content Feedback Loop

The cyclical process for the STARZ partnership can be simplified down to 4 stages: Brainstorming and Conceptualization, Creative Production, Test and Data Collection, and Insights and Reporting.

My team and I kept an "always be testing" attitude, believing that even poor performance provides valuable learnings about our audiences. In addition to always asking new questions, new creative opportunities were identified using insights from former tests and applying them to promising areas we want to push further. When developing creative strategy, ad campaigns fell into one of two buckets: 1) Untested ideas based on story themes and potentially untapped audiences and 2) Iterations based on past performance data.

We frequently employed A/B testing for creative on our platforms, to better identify the variable that affects audience engagement. Additionally, we would test against both broad and specific audience types. Once we loop back to the first stage of the creative process, we're analyzing what's working and using that to inform brainstorming. We do this by aggregating data about specific creative dimensions, such as color, aspect ratio, copy messaging, which character is featured, etc., outlining what we want to learn from the next batch of tests.

Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest

Client Relationship Building

trust is essential for innovation

Due to the persistent nature of this project and the data-focused nature of the team, we would share insights on a regular cadence with the STARZ internal team. This was essential to success, as I established an open line of communication with STARZ to discuss new hypotheses about our users and how their internal team and our aquistion team could create empathetic experiences.