Work

Select samples produced as creative director, copywriter, ad hoc strategist, or all three, including email, microsites/landing pages, social media, and print.

Case Study Highlights:

B2B+C

With retailers seeking more efficient, streamlined ways of processing payments to offer consumers a better checkout experience, Citibank sought to promote its new CitiPay suite of products.

At the enterprise level, CitiPay was offered a brief window of opportunity to harness the bank’s public website and required a net-new landing page despite having almost zero content to populate it.

So we drafted the Reasons to Believe (RTB), mined supporting statistics, consumer research and testimonials, press, leveraged a work-in-progress video, and created new illustrations to align to recent rebranding efforts.

The result? Senior marketing executives at Citibank were so impressed, they awarded the CitiPay business unit a new product slot in their credit card portfolio. Creating a whole new branded entity and go-to-market strategy can typically take months – we achieved this success in mere days.

Loyalty

Volkswagen offers one of the richest owner loyalty programs in the biz, delivering genuinely desirable, often one-of-a-kind experiences to their owner base.

For this initiative, Volkswagen secured the rights to an exclusive premier screening of Marvel’s latest superhero extravaganza, offering owners the chance to see it before anyone else with a private screening, the usual concession treats, VIP parking, on-site experiences, and swag.

For legal reasons, promotional materials couldn’t include any spoiler alerts or details about the movie, so we proposed an animated “Bat signal” to increase engagement, along with short, hooky lines to draw owners in and immerse them in the superhero headspace.

Emails averaged a 62% open rate, 37% click-through, and all available seats for multiple screenings were full – epic results!

See Volkswagen Plus emails below

Live polling

Engagement and interaction are paramount to the success of any marketing campaign, particularly in the digital space where uptake can be tracked and measured in real time.

For our Wondery podcasts client, we constantly optimized subsequent initiatives based on results from previous iterations and, as predicted, two notable trends emerged: emails with 1. animated headers, and 2: interactive questionnaires increased both engagement and click-throughs significantly.

For this particular deployment, we partnered with Movable Ink to include their live polling feature, enabling subscribers to vote on their favourite genre of podcast. When they vote, and click through to the corresponding landing page, they were presented with links to more relevant, tailored listening selections based on their chosen category.

The results were impressive on two fronts: 1. More time spent on the Wondery website exploring various genres outside of subscribers’ typical go-to categories, and 2: More podcast downloads overall.

See Wondery emails below

Strategy, supercharged

Trusted by millions for their daily banking, Citi struggled to attract investing and financial planning clients. For years, they’d been deploying safe, predictable communications that lacked “punch” in the face of competitors with more direct, compelling statements, like “Grow your money with QuestTrade”, and uptake was lacklustre.

So when our clients came to us with the same problem, essentially seeking the same solution to what they saw as an awareness problem, we challenged them with a bolder strategy.

Digging deeper, we found a 100+ page report published by Citi Investing highlighting potential for growth in emerging markets, like AI and Cybersecurity, along with powerful testimonials from some of Citi’s senior investing professionals. It turns out one department hadn’t been effectively partnering with the other, so all these details had previously been missed.

Our ability to connect the dots, and devise messaging that was more relevant, au courant, and compelling ultimately yielded the click-throughs, and appointment bookings with Financial Advisors that had been flatline for years.

See Citi emails below

Not-for-profit

SickKids® is primarily a publicly funded hospital in Toronto, Canada but also utilizes eCRM, social media, and direct mail to meet their fundraising goals.

Compelling statistics and real patient stories are key communication drivers, yet we discovered through iterative testing that including an additional engagement device in our direct mail packages – in this instance, interactive – led to higher donations.

In the work featured below, a “Mad Libs” style exercise intentionally omits words from a story, allowing donors to get creative, fill in the blanks, and send back with their donations. Some also choose to just send them back blank and let the young patients fill them in for a fun diversion.

This added element proved effective on an emotional level, as it offered donors a connection with the kids they were helping, and vice versa, producing a greater spike in donations than even previous campaigns incorporating other kinds of additional engagement elements.

See all SickKids® elements below

Select work samples

Every piece has a brief, a strategy, a rationale, and ideally performance metrics – all too numerous to include here. If you’d like to know more, or see more examples in a specific vertical, please contact me.