Award-Winning Ads

Playful and personalized performance marketing.

Crafted in 2019 as Senior Creative Manager at Hopper.

This ad we created won the Facebook Storyteller Award for Best Direct Response Story ad for Travel. I first created this in After Effects and then rebuilt on the Smartly.io platform, allowing us to deliver thousands of personalized versions. Jumping bunny illustrated by Thomas Fitzpatrick and put in motion by Wonderlust.

I. Background

Hopper is a travel app for iOS and Android that helps travelers book flights and hotels at the right time, saving up to 40%. Hopper has helped over 50M travelers plan and book trips around the world.

II. The Challenge

How can Hopper stand out in a busy sea of social media ads? Can we deliver ads for hundreds of thousands of flight origin and destination combinations that still feel personalized and relevant? And how can we test ads in a structured way that allows us to continually build upon our learnings?

III. My Role

I worked in house as the Senior Creative Manager during this project and led the creative strategy, design, and animation. For this project, I worked with our Director of User Acquisition and Senior User Acquisition Manager.

This ad was created to give a direct look into the app and what it has to offer while still showcasing a great flight deal that's relevant for each viewer.

VII. More DETAILS

First, we designed a testing process that allowed us to quickly iterate on new creatives. The plan was simple—each week we test a new ad creative and work on a 4-week cycle.

Week 1 we test the top-performing ad against a static iteration of that ad, making small, incremental changes that are easy to isolate. Week 2 we test the top-performing ad against a video iteration of that ad, once again making only small, incremental changes. In week 3 we test the top-performing ad against a completely new static ad creative. Then, in week 4, we test the top-performing ada against a completely new video ad creative.

This process allowed us to not only plan for a reliable cycle of new ad creatives, but allowed to both continually improve our best ads and test any sparkly new idea we had.

It also established a strong working relationship between the creative and user acquisition teams, working closely with one another to come up with fresh ideas to test and relying on one another to continually improve the work that we all do.

We learned a lot along the way. The impact of music, sound design, color, timing, messaging, and so much more.

After just a few months of testing we lowered CPI by 51% to an overall CPI of $1.19.