Slack’s 2017 “Where Work Happens” Advertising Campaign
Slack launched a global, integrated marketing campaign in 2017 to bring its "Where Work Happens" message to targeted audiences. Both city-specific and career-specific advertisements were placed in targeted areas to personalize the impact through unique, custom artwork and messaging.
I designed all of the creative for the campaign with the goal of driving top-line awareness through coordinated advertorials, podcasts, print ads and out of home advertising.
The rotating, customizable scenes display modern work as a destination itself – a larger-than-life world where all of these collaborative interactions can take place.
I built an illustration library where each of these individual pieces could be pulled and placed together to create new scenes. The library featured artwork that could be generalized for national ads, or customized for the cities that they would appear in (a giant guitar as part of the Nashville skyline or ski slopes for Salt Lake City). Others could utilize artwork that would be specific to the industries we were targeting (swatch books for creatives or quarterly reports for sales teams).
This was an extremely collaborative project with the stakeholders in marketing as well as our production agencies who helped make all of the placements and applications happen!
Out Of Home and Print Advertising
The city-specific advertising focused on Nashville, Salt Lake City, and Berlin as test markets for the campaign. We ran a mixture of out of home media in each market featuring both “Where Work Happens” ads as well as “Where ____ Happens” ads customized to each market. In Nashville: billboards, wallscapes, bus shelters, and exterior bus ads. In SLC: billboards, exterior bus ads, and exterior light rail ads. And in Berlin: columns, posters, and metro stations.
This drove an estimated 76M OOH impressions in Nashville; an estimated 64M OOH impressions in SLC; and an estimated 128M OOH impressions in Berlin.
The result was a boost in unaided awareness of ↑23% for SLC, ↑19% for Nashville, and ↑63% for Berlin, and a boost in searches of ↑1% for SLC, ↑3% for Nashville, and ↑4% for Berlin.
National print advertising (shown above) as well as city-specific, full-page ads in local business and news periodicals (shown below: Nashville newspaper advertisement, as well as one of the French newspaper advertisements).
Advertorials
We also published eight print advertorials, each with its own unique editorial illustration in the campaign’s style and an accompanying full-page brand advertisement on topics relevant to knowledge workers and potential Slack customers.
Shown below are the editorial illustrations and layout designs for INC Magazine, FastCompany, WIRED, Delta Sky Magazine, and Nashville Post.
Digital
We ran campaign ads specific to each local market across Google and Pandora (in conjunction with audio podcast advertisements) as well as a social media takeover of our Facebook and Twitter accounts featuring the campaign artwork.
Customer Love Boxes
Another tactic that we launched was a series of "customer love box" mailers to customers and prospective customers in our targeted cities of Nashville, Berlin, and Salt Lake City.
I designed a custom shipping container with campaign illustrations wrapping the exterior of the box. Inside of the box, there was a custom folder containing case studies from other customer companies; stickers, postcards, and a coffee mug with illustrations specific to the recipient's city; a pair of Slack socks, as well as a pack of very nice tea and cookies "from your friends at Slack."
