christophershannon.io

Have you ever heard of Communities In Schools? If so, you are in the minority. But for a 40 year old, nationwide organization helping millions of students (check them out), that’s a problem…

Our research found that they had very low brand recognition, but that once people found out about them, they were quick to become brand advocates. Thus began an ongoing awareness campaign that lead to an 18% jump in brand recall in key markets after the first year.

In the second year of the campaign we were inspired by mosaic art to explore the many moments, people, and things that come together to make up a successful student. It became a multi platform digital and experiential campaign called #WhatWeAreMadeOf. While working closely with the clients in house creative team and the artist Jason Mecier. I acted as lead strategist, technologist, and creative counsel.

After Launch, the client had a secondary ask: to activate Education thought leaders at the SXSWedu conference. For this, I lead the team to rapidly develop and implement a user generated social media activation across the convention center that lead to 500k+ impressions among the Ed thought leader audience (and their followers) over the 3 day conference.

As a side perk SXSW liked the campaign so much they gave me a free badge to SXSWInteractive.

When AARP asked for a campaign to inform 40+ year olds (the most affected demographic) about the dangers of social media scams we thought… Where better than on social media?

As a creative team, we took a hands on approach to ideation and created short concept videos for each idea. After presentation to the client we settled on “Fantasy Scams”. A concept that leveraged well known fairy tales, set in the social media era, to illustrate different scams.

Ex. Evil queen orders a poisoned apple for Snow White from a shady online retailer, but instead, receives a regular banana.

As lead technologist, and because this was a social media only campaign, we leveraged new ad techniques adept at storytelling like facebook Canvas ads and sequential advertising. These allowed us to lead our audience through a defined user journey ending with our email acquisition goal.

Because these ads would be experienced almost exclusive on handheld devices we knew we needed the visuals to be as fantastical as the stories we were telling, the creative team settled on acclaimed cinematographer Dean Alexander to shoot the video vignettes and stills we stitched together for the non linear interactive ads.

The amount of fun the team had making this campaign came through and it has been recognized with highest prize by 5 awards nationally.

Every once in awhile you get to work on a project, or for a person that truly inspires you. While working on the Pramila Jayapal for Congress team, during her freshman run, I was lucky enough to do both.

As the Lead Creative and Digital Strategist of the team that handled her online advertising I was responsible for directing the creative and strategy of many dozens of display, video, and social ads serving various goals. These ranged from brand ID, to targeted issue awareness and traffic driving, to get out the vote (GOTV) initiatives. In partnership with the video team we utilized ultra compressed video elements bringing Pramila to life in simple display ads that lead to a click through rate 5x above benchmark.

The campaign was recognised nationally by the Pollie Awards as second best political digital ad campaign of 2016, behind Bernie Sanders.

Helping to elect such a visionary, and the first Indian-American woman to the House, was truly a professional highlight.

After research showed that the creative approach for the ADA “Find a Dentist” campaign didn’t work well on social media, I was brought on to work with the creative team in order to very quickly develop a creative direction that would be more engaging on social media. Within a few days, the team and I created 5 different concepts for the large national social buy, with various ads in each. After presentation, the client “loved” and approved all concepts.

My favorite was “smiles”, a concept I was inspired by Warhol’s print series to create. It utilized static image ads each a unique and diverse set of lips. The ad post copy was simply emoji as eyes, turning the entire post into a face. Variations in device and manufacture gave each user a unique, slightly different experience. Facebook said they had never seen anything like this before. In one set we also leveraged the newly launched Facebook reactions to create a series of reaction ads with teeth. It was a fun and fast project that lead to some great results for the client. Users liked them too, leading one user to comment:

‘The American Dental Assoc. marketing team has obviously lost its collective fucking mind and I love it so much. #ada #americandentalasociation #genius’

After the housing market crash of 2008 the US government realized it was time to protect the American people through information and regulatory control of financial institutions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was born.

The problem was, most people didn’t know about it, especially the people that needed help most.

So began a multi year, multi channel, national awareness campaign to empower and inform consumers. I played many roles; from creating a new code set to make Flash ads 508 Compliant, to later leading Strategy and Technology while co-leading the Art Direction team. We evolved the visual language to feel contemporary, digital friendly, and approachable. In partnership with Facebook, we also leveraged newly available ad technologies.

It led to campaign that, despite; complex messaging, multiple languages, unique technical requirements, and hundreds of ad variations; engaged and empowered tens of millions of consumers.