Award-Winning Ads

High-performing direct response and branded ads.

Crafted in 2019-2022 as Senior Creative Manager at Hopper.

The design and animation for this quick Travel Deal Tuesday promo came together in about 5 hours after a last-minute request. This was a fun one to see what I could pull off for a brand-focused paid social piece on just a few hours notice.

I. Background

Hopper is the most downloaded travel booking app in the United States — helping over 70M travelers save money on flights, hotels, and rental cars.

II. The Challenge

How can Hopper stand out in a busy sea of ads? How can we use creative as a lever to continually meet or exceed aggressive monthly growth targets?

III. My Role

I led all aspects of creative strategy, design, editing, and animation, and collaborated with with our Head of User Acquisition and Senior User Acquisition Managers on our growth and performance marketing strategy.

This ad came together by combining existing footage of actors and influencers that we had in our archive with new, animated visuals. In just a few days work, we had a brand-focused ad that has been a top peformer for connected TV placements.

IV. OUR SOLUTION

When analyzing our top-performing social ads, we continually find that the best performers either really stand out in one's social feed or blend in as native-looking content. Anything that looks too much like a typical ad is met with mediocre performance.

As a result, we focus our performance creative around these two categories:

  1. Ads that stand out — typically taking the form of super minimalist designs, delaying a message's resolution, or breaking the plane of a social feed
  2. Ads that blend in as native content — often taking the form of POV photos/videos, platform-specific trends, memes, and UGC-style content

These creatives perform extremely well and allow us to grow our user base quickly and cheaply.

While we do look at top-of-funnel metrics to get a quick temperature check on performance, we ultimately want to make sure we're driving real, substantive growth. So we look to in-app conversion, ROAS, and net payback as the primary indicators in identify winning creative concepts.

We've also incorporated our findings into more brand-focused campaigns. By balancing performance and brand, we've been able to run efficient campaigns at high budgets.

Our team did a lot of great work in 2021 — leading to us becoming the most downloaded travel booking app in the United States.

We regularly read user reviews — both the good and the bad — to keep our finger on the pulse of the joys and frustrations that travelers experience when using Hopper. We wanted to highlight some good user reviews in this ad. In addition to the design and animation, I performed the voiceover.
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.
This ad was created to be a “thumb stopper” — an ad that breaks the monotony of a social feed and stops someone from scrolling.
We also run more brand-focused campaigns. Occasionally we'll work with external partners on these sorts of ads; however, it can be both expensive and time intensive. We wanted to see if we could create some branded campaigns quickly in house. I created this one in a day using only footage from a stock video subscription service. This ad outperformed many of the externally produced ads that often took weeks to come together.
This ad was created to give a personalized app overview — we used the Smarly.io platform to creative thousands of different versions that incorporate a variety of origins and destinations, and to automatically update the prices so the ad is always accurate.