How we made four banners in 19 days

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

First three days

About a month ago, two designers, one marketer, product manager and copywriter, gathered in a room with green walls.

What united us was not a joke, but an advertising campaign that needed to be developed for launching a new video service - with its own chips and, of course, competitors already present on the market. To one degree or another competitors.

The task is clear, there are deadlines, it was surprisingly easy to start. Armed with the experience of the German design studio HORT, we held several productive workshops and found an interesting concept, and along the way we generated a bunch of ideas. It took about 60 man hours to clean the training. If you add thoughts “behind the scenes”, then to the given figure you can add 20, or even 30.

I won’t list the entire list of documented ideas, something else might come in handy. In the launch campaign, they decided to use "Ayyo recommends they like it."

For a better understanding below is a little background:

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Even before the development of the service itself began, we knew that you can’t just take and launch a product. Therefore, they examined the market, found a real problem and began to think about ways to solve it. In order not to overload the text with details, here are just the main numbers - the runet consists of about 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 through the joint efforts of the team, a continuously improving system of personal recommendations was implemented. Therefore, it’s now difficult to miss the tag designer in the header of the site, with the help of which it takes just two or three clicks to compile a search query of almost any complexity.

Butting competitors with the catalog was considered stupid. Movie quality is almost equally high in many video services. Somewhere, of course, there are rogue domestic television series. But if we measure only by “Hollywood”, then both the quality and the price are approximately the same for everyone. Therefore, “Ayyo recommends, the audience likes it,” not “Ayio has hundreds of great films.”

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Day 4

Having played simple roles at the workshops "according to Hort" and determined the front of work, we divided the preparation of the launch campaign into sections. Among other things, I got copywriting of banners for posting on third-party thematic resources.

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



There were many thoughts on implementation, but some did not fit in with the chosen concept, while others turned out to be incredibly difficult to develop. Associations of the third order and beyond are not for short messages. Banners were required as clear as possible, but intriguing. At about this stage, the text decided to move the larger “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 a movie. But when they do this on the very successful recommendation of Ayyo, 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 everyday affairs in an “image”. A kind of visualization of the inner world.

Days 6 to 8

Then we began to fill the mudboard. This is such a thing, where associations are gathered, expressed in pictures, texts, photographs, sometimes even in some objects. In short, they began to rake into a heap everything that could lead to the right thoughts and inspire specifics. The only limitation is that the components of the mudboard are not someone's ready-made solution. This usually gets in the way.



So the outlines of the banners began to emerge and the first versions of texts appeared in which we still did not name the audience. At first there were three "he" and one "she." Ugly. Therefore, everyone liked the idea of ​​calling heroes familiar human names, they accepted it unanimously.

Days 9 to 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 are not crazy, they are just passionate about the movie”:


Spectators watch movies and do something else


Our viewers are not crazy , they are easily carried away

By roughly imagining the final form of banners, we spent two days searching for suitable actors for four roles and one for collecting props and shooting. At the casting stage, they attracted friends from the modeling agency who helped not only with people, but with props and organization. The result is hundreds of photos and just four good shots. But what! No longer needed.

Day 12

During one of the last 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 a desire to appeal to people in short.

Plus week

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



We settled on the opposition. We made the text cleaner and more logical, while adapting the lines so that they complement the pictures, and the pictures are texts. Together they now explain moments from the life of our viewers:

Housewife Natasha is cooking dinner inspired by Moulin Rouge. Butcher Sergey watched Sweeney Todd and even at work he can’t forget about his emotions. Oleg likes crazy comedies like "The Hangover", he recalls them in the morning. Nicholas imagined himself at least Thor from The Avengers.

So in nineteen days we made four banners. I am not saying that we spent all the time on this particular site 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’s not a shame to challenge “business cards in an hour” and “sites for 5 thousand rubles.”