Adobe

The final assignment for the Strategic Design Fellows program challenged us to participate in the American Advertising Federation 2020 National Student Advertising Competition with the client Adobe. Our individual agencies were each tasked with creating a B2B ad campaign to increase awareness of Adobe Experience Cloud for Advertising. The agency with the best campaign would then represent the program in the regional competition.

Task:

This challenge tasked us with creating a B2B campaign focused on increasing awareness of Adobe’s adtech solution - Adobe Experience Cloud for advertising or Adobe Ad Cloud. The adtech solution consists of Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Audience Messenger. The target audience included advertising media buyers in U.S. Enterprise companies and media agencies with a minimum annual advertising budget of $1M. The core message the client wanted us to convey is that connected is how advertising should be.

Research Process:

Since this was a B2B client we couldn’t use the traditional research methods that we would normally use on consumers such as surveys and focus groups. We decided instead to use our network and conduct in-depth interviews of our target audience to see what people in the industry value in their adtech. We used these interviews to understand what mattered most to our target audience when using adtech and the difference between larger agencies compared to smaller agencies. We wanted to understand how the target demographic interacted with adtech and role it played in ROA.

Insight:

After numerous creative brainstorming sessions and conducting in-depth interviews we reached the insight that our target audience within the B2B space lacked an awareness of Adobe’s adtech offerings. Because of this lack of awareness, it would be imperative to thoroughly demonstrate Adobe’s adtech’s complete capabilities and how it can positively impact ROI.

Strategy:

For the campaign we decided to use children to show that Adobe Experience Cloud makes life easier since things that children can do are assumed to be easy. We created a three-pronged plan to demonstrate Adobe Experience Cloud’s capabilities. First, we would build awareness through LinkedIn ads and print ads in magazines such as Adweek and Fast Company. We chose two separate taglines to meet our audiences two needs: demonstration of ROA and the ease that integration provides.

Then we would use experiential marketing at events such as the Adobe Summit and NYC Advertising Week to show how Adobe Experience Cloud works. At these events we would have a booth set up with children and iPads and they would lead participants through their own campaign in a choose your own adventure game using Adobe Adtech features to demonstrate how the software works. Since we planned to use children the campaign in the game would be focused on increasing positive sentiment among parents towards the idea of ice cream for dinner.

Finally, after the choose your own adventure game at key industry events we would then follow up with the people we connected with to build on earned PR and the in person impressions we made. We would do this through a digital marketing email campaign to follow up with participants after their engagement at industry events. We also decided to send them ice cream since they created campaigns revolving around ice cream for dinner.