How we made four banners in 19 days

This story is not a couple of hours, three days or even one week. The text below is a story about how, in pursuit of the ideal result, I, as part of a great team, took and spent a lot of work and personal time to solve a specific task.

First three days

About a month ago, two designers, one marketer, product manager and copywriter, gathered in the same room with green walls.
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We were united not by an anecdote, but by an advertising campaign that had to be developed for the launch of a new video service - with its own chips and, of course, competitors already present in the market. In one way or another competitors.

The task is clear, there is a time limit, it was surprisingly easy to get started. Armed with the experience of the German design studio HORT, we conducted several productive workshops and found an interesting concept, and along the way we generated a bunch of ideas. About 60 man-hours were spent on clean training. If you add thoughts "behind the scenes", then you can add 20 or even 30 to this figure.

I will not list the whole list of documented ideas, something else might be useful. They decided to use “Ayo recommends, they like” in the launch campaign.

For a better understanding of below a little background:

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Even before the development of the service itself, we knew that it was impossible to simply take and launch a product. Therefore, we investigated the market, found a real problem and began to think about ways to solve it. In order not to overload the text with details, only the main figures - the RuNet consists of approximately 41 million users, 3% of these people paid for a one-time viewing of the video at least once and almost 34% did not know what to choose.

To solve the problem with the joint efforts of the team, a continuously improved personal recommendation system was implemented. Therefore, in the header of the site it is now difficult not to notice the tag constructor, with the help of which only two or three clicks are required to compose a search query of almost any complexity.

It was considered foolish to butt out with the catalog competitors. The quality of the movie is almost equally high in many video services. Somewhere, of course, there are nischebrodskie domestic television series. But if only Hollywood is measured, then both the quality and the price of all are approximately on the same level. Therefore, “Ayyo recommends, viewers like,” and not “In Ayyo hundreds of great films.”

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Day 4

Having played simple roles at the workshops on “Hort” and defining the scope of work, we divided the preparation of the launch campaign into sections. I, among other things, got copywriting of banners for placement on third-party thematic resources.

In a small static picture and a couple of lines of text it was required to convey the message “Ayyo recommends so successfully that it’s just wow!”



Thoughts on the implementation were many, but some did not fit with the chosen concept, while others turned out to be incredibly difficult to develop. Associations of the third order and further - not for short messages. Banners were required as clear as possible, but intriguing. At about this stage, the text decided to move a more extensive “Ayyo recommends”, and give the rest of the original idea, the result of the recommendations, to the picture.

Day 5

We came up with four characters: a housewife, an electrician, an office employee and a butcher. If you do not go into details - ordinary people who watch movies. But when they do this on Ayyo’s very successful recommendation, they unwittingly begin to empathize with the heroes of the films so much that they themselves reincarnate. They do not notice this and continue to engage in daily activities already in the "image". Such visualization of the inner world.

Days 6 to 8

Then we began to fill the board. This is such a thing, where the associations are expressed, expressed in pictures, texts, photographs, sometimes even in some objects. In short, they began to rake in a pile everything that can lead to the right thoughts and inspire concrete things. The only restriction is that the components of a mindboard are not someone's ready-made solution. It usually gets in the way.



Thus, the outlines of banners began to emerge and the first versions of texts appeared, in which we still could not name the audience. First there were three “he” and one “she”. Ugly. Therefore, everyone liked the idea of ​​calling the heroes with familiar human names, accepted unanimously.

Days 9 through 11

We approached the photo shoot with two main versions of the texts. In one they identified the audience with Julius Caesar, who knew how to do a lot of things at the same time, in the other they played on the opposition “our viewers did not go crazy, they were just keen on cinema”:


Viewers watch movies and do something else.


Our viewers are not crazy, they are easily addicted

Approximately presenting the final type of banners, we devoted two days to finding suitable actors for four roles and one to collecting props and shooting. Even at the stage of casting attracted friends from the modeling agency, who helped not only with people, but props and organization. The result - hundreds of photos and only four valid snapshots. But what! No more reluctance.

Day 12

During one of the latest photo shoots, another version of the text appeared:


With explanations, but too long

It is a pity that he eventually had to be abandoned in favor of reducing the number of characters in each message. Played the desire to appeal to people in short.

Plus week

Then it came "after the photo shoot." In the last seven days there have been a lot of design, discussions, additions and refinements of details, retouching and other things. Almost final layouts required slightly different text. Such adjustments, if the work is not put on stream, not often, but happen. As a result, we came up with the following options:



We stopped on the opposition. We made the text cleaner and more logical, at the same time adapting the lines so that they complemented the pictures, and the pictures - the texts. Together they now explain moments from the lives of our viewers:

Housewife Natasha is cooking dinner inspired by the Moulin Rouge. Butcher Sergei looked "Sweeney Todd" and even at work can not forget about the experienced emotions. Oleg likes icky comedies like “The Bachelor Party in Vegas”, he remembers them in the morning. Nicholas imagined himself to be at least a Torus from the Avengers.

So for nineteen days we made four banners. I'm not saying that we spent all this time on this particular area of ​​work. At the same time, much more was done, and this work is only part of a huge complex for organizing a campaign for the commercial launch of a new service. The story above is a living example of how to work. With this approach, it is not a shame to challenge the "business cards for an hour" and "sites for 5 thousand rubles."