Adobe Stock is pretty much the same as any other stock. Except, it’s embedded in Photoshop so designers can work faster. Why would they care? Because the biggest barrier in delivering highly creative output is the combination of time pressure from ridiculous deadlines and perfectionist art directors slowing down the creative process. From now on, designers can finally keep up with their most intrusive co-workers: hovering art directors.
So we brought the most well known creative industry stereotype to life and created The Hovering Art Director. Famous for having more ideas than any designer can keep up with, micromanaging and taking up time with last minute improvements.
With speed as the core benefit, the tagline ‘Keep up with hovering art directors. Make it with Adobe Stock.’ called to action throughout a series of activities, from light-hearted entertaining to more serious and inspiring.
Creative Execution
We created an online film called “The Hovering Art Director” (HAD). This short mockumentary portrays a designer being hovered over by a stereotype art director. With Adobe Stock and his Photoshop skills, he delivers an outstanding key visual for a new ginger beer brand.
The ad from the film not only became an advertisement for Adobe Stock. It was subject of a series of webinars showing how software, skills and Adobe Stock enable both speed and outstanding work.
To further push the HAD-phenomenon, we followed up with a designer toy, literally bringing the campaign to live. The collectible comes in Adobe-branded packaging and features an inbuilt speaker with 18 lines of pure wisdom. The action figure was sent to design departments world wide. To stimulate interaction, we launched a website that awards an action figure to the most original and outrageous HAD-quotes.
Reach
We managed to qualitatively reach 18,5 million impressions within the creative industry worldwide (in completed views).
Engagement
Not only did we managed to reach them, we also engaged them around the product: we had an engagement rate of 3.26%, over three times higher than the industry average, with a positive sentiment on all three target groups (100% positive score) and a social view completion rate twice the benchmark. Over 3000 designers willingly put an Adobe-branded design toy on their desk, so the toy can be seen as the ultimate foot-in-the-door item.
Conversion
This converted into 12,6%% leads, and the webinars attracted nearly 700% more participants than strived for.
Besides all that, one thing’s for sure: there is no valid reason to complain about not being able to keep up with hovering art directors anymore.
The most interesting prospects for Adobe Stock (besides individual design professionals), are medium and large enterprises. In most of these organizations, stock buying involves various layers from designers to senior management deciding on the purchase. Adobe research shows that designers are key influencers in this process. Therefore we opted for an approach that consistently addresses the culture of designers and creatives.
The campaign targets the complete Decision Making Unit. We address designers by using the stereotype of the hovering art director and we draw the attention of senior management through a playful characterisation of their own image and behavior.
Next to the various campaign elements (video, designer toy, webinars, website), we seek publicity through stereotype (humour and lifestyle), the designer toy (art and design) and webinars (design and craft).
In all communications we stretch the call to action to ‘Keep up with hovering art directors. Make it with Adobe stock’.