B2C Case Study:

Digital Advertising & Campaign Management

Managing An Interactive & Emerging Media Advertising Campaign for Disney/Pixar

BrightLine | Disney/Pixar | Samsung

My Contributions:

  • Creative Direction & Strategy Development

  • UX/UI Design

  • Game Design

  • Client Communication

  • Post-Campaign Analysis

The Team:

  • Disney/Pixar Liasons for Digital Advertising

  • Samsung Publishing Representatives

  • A BrightLine Senior Designer & Project Manager

  • A BrightLine Data Analyst

Tools:

  • Adobe Creative Suite

  • Samsung SmartTV Ad Platform

  • Slack

  • Atlassian Jira

The Problem

The client, Disney/Pixar, was promoting its upcoming movie, The Good Dinosaur. To reach customers on their SmartTVs, the client purchased advertising space on Samsung TVs. Traditional ads are typically static images or short-form videos—but with the help of Brightline's technology, the brand could deliver an interactive TV (iTV) ad experience for far more engagement.

The problem was shared among the brand, the publisher, and Brightline. For Disney/Pixar—with only a little over a month before the film's release—it would be risky to experiment with a new and unfamiliar form of advertising. Samsung and Brightline needed to establish themselves as reliable potential advertising partners by getting the ad up as quickly as possible while meeting all parties' high standards. No pressure, right?

The Approach

I worked as part of a two-person team with my co-worker, who was also a Senior Designer and Project Manager. Our combined experience and small team size allow us to work quickly and stay agile. My colleague and I shared the same strategic and design responsibilities throughout the campaign but divided the client management work. He focused on account management, while I concentrated on project and asset management.

We received character artwork, descriptions, logos, and film trailers from Disney/Pixar as assets. Our job was to create all other elements within brand guidelines and the publisher's capability. Using our expertise and supported by our research and data team, we developed three features that we believed would generate the most engagement: a video gallery, a character gallery, and a diagnostic quiz game. 

One of my main contributions was the overall look of the experience. The stone button motif I designed complemented the film's aesthetic and provided a nice contrast.

I was assigned to develop the logic for the diagnostic quiz. The goal of this feature was to offer users an activity that allowed them to relate to the characters. For a successful quiz, I had to ensure three things: each quiz permutation had an outcome, each character had at least one permutation attributed to them, and the quiz result had to make sense with the character's traits. 

Challenges

The client was unfamiliar with iTV ads and the standard launch timeline. Their ad buy was already in place, and the film's debut was approaching quickly, so time was of the essence. Onboarding the client, obtaining assets, designing, and obtaining client approvals required constant communication and coordination, both internally and externally. Thankfully, I'd had several trials by fire by that point working on campaigns for American Express, Lexus, Unilever, and more.  

For the design, one challenge was the amount of text the client wanted to use for each character. The image gallery's specifications limited the space we had. Since there was no time to get new copy approved, we had to work with what we had. This meant sacrificing uniformity for practicality. (If you're type-A like I am, I'm sure that might make you cringe. But don't worry, everything else in the experience was consistently sized)

Results

The experience was launched on Samsung Smart TVs on time and saw far more engagement than their static or short-form video ads. Instead of a single trailer, the brand could show three videos in the video gallery, and users could familiarize themselves with the characters through meaningful interaction.

The combination of the ad's strong performance and our stellar management warranted Disney returning to Brightline for a Disney Infinity iTV experience. 

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