I was brought onto the Amazon Music team as the sole designer for the support of the launch of Amazon Music into Canada. We launched Prime Music in Canada in 2 months, where I delivered the entire package of assets, from multiple product landing page, partnered artist pages, 500+ sitewide and appwide graphics, emails, print ads, social graphics, paid media, and original playlist artwork for the Music player. Once we launched, I continued to support the Canada team, but with an expanded role into also supporting the US team, and an added role of leading Amazon Music’s launch into 35 more countries Europe and Latin America. This launch was similar to Canada with similar original graphic requests and brand synchronization across multiple cultures. After these, I lead the Amazon Music launch into Australia, as well as the second launch into Canada of our expanded paid subscriber Music tier.
As the team grew, my role further expanded into supporting larger initiatives, campaigns, and product launches for the US, all while making sure these campaigns were aligning with the evolving new brand for Amazon Music. The support and design systems also set the standard for the launch of similar products across the globe. I also became the lead designer for the global paid marketing teams, where I supported major ad banner campaigns, creating thousands of ad units across 9 different languages. The biggest wins included creating a design system, template and workflow that allowed me to create 9,000 ad banners and 3,000 onsite/offsite graphics created for the 2018 Holiday campaign, and 3000+ ad banners and graphics created for Prime Day – compared to only about 200 the year before.
Concept; Design; Illustration; Art Direction
Historically, Fitbit had never been a major advertiser on the Amazon platform, mostly utilizing eComm desktop and mobile banner units. Our goal was to present them with some big ideas to not only help grow them as an Amazon advertiser, but to help grow their brand with exposure to more customers.
As part of a collection of proposed ideas, Fitbit immediately bought the concept of the proposed running game. A truly unique execution that was a first on the Amazon advertising platform, the running game launched across all of Amazon's devices—desktop, Fire tablet, Fire TV, and mobile.
The Charge 2 Running Challenge was one of the biggest metric successes in Amazon Media Group history for the Fire tablet, reaching a 5% clickthrough rate over 8.5 million impressions – 5x higher than the average CTR for wake screens on Fire tablets. The overall campaign reached 36.5 million customers.
Due to the running game's success, Fitbit requested a second game to coincide with their second holiday product release of the year: the Flex 2 swimming fitness tracker. Through an escalated timeline, the Flex 2 Swimming Challenge was created and launched in time for the Flex 2 product release. Not to be outdone, the swimming execution broke the recently set CTR record with a 7% clickthrough rate.
Once again, the success of the second game brought Fitbit back to us, asking for a fully branded retail front on Amazon. The custom site housed all of Fitbit’s products (as well as desktop integration of the Fitbit running game), and was designed to allow the customer to shop a branded Fitbit store within the security of their Amazon account.
By the end of the year, Fitbit had increased its annual Amazon Media Group budget to $2.84 million – an 84% YoY increase.
View executions:
• Charge 2 Running Challenge gameplay
• Flex 2 Swimming Challenge gameplay
Concept; Design; Illustration; Development
Crocs had never been an advertiser with the Amazon Media Group. The design team was approached with an ask to put together a few standard executions as part of a larger pitch to the client to introduce them to advertising on Amazon devices for the upcoming holiday season. Upon further research, I discovered Crocs' Star Wars line, and immediately linked this with the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. These images portray the exact mocks of a custom experience that was presented to the client, who bought the execution immediately without any requested changes.
Upon device wake, the customer is presented with the immediate wake screen with a dual call-to-action, giving them the choice to decide between the Light and Dark sides. Depending on the choice, they are taken to a custom landing page where they can shop for (and toggle between) themed Star Wars Crocs.
Crocs went from spending $0 to a year-end $460k spend, projecting them as a top tier client the following year. The Star Wars execution garnered a 2.04% CTR, twice the amount of the average CTR on the Fire tablet.
Quote from Crocs: "We wish our advertising agency did this quality of work."
Concept; Design; Art Direction
As part of a pre-sales pitch to Elex Tech, the maker of the mobile game Clash of Kings, we proposed the idea of "playable ads". Due to strict policies around Amazon devices, we were unable to deliver actual playable executions on the Fire tablet. Instead, I pivoted to the concept of triggering miniature animations to simulate gameplay.
The tablet experience was a first of its kind for the Amazon advertising platform, and ran over Black Friday / Cyber Monday. The experience netted Clash of Kings over 30 million impressions, helped claim its highest ranking ever in the Amazon Appstore, and for the first time ever, outranked its main competitors (Mobile Strike and Game of War).
Video execution:
Concept; Design; Illustration; Page Build
Amazon Media Group gained its largest client with Newell Brands – a holding company for brands like Coleman, Rubbermaid, Sharpie, Paper Mate, Oster, Sunbeam, Elmer's, Crock-Pot, Prismacolor, and Calphalon among others – of which I was the lead designer for the account.
The Gear Up & Get Out There event was a shoppable custom page that housed an assortment of outdoors gear from several brands under the Newell umbrella. This was Newell’s first foray into a more immersive shopping experience on Amazon, and we were able to sell the client on the idea with a high-fidelity mockup. The challenges that arose during design and build centered around 1) the client not having any assets to work with, so everything was made from scratch within a very escalated timeline, and 2) working with the developer team on a page that broke outside of the normal systematic patterns for these types of experience (ie. we pushed the framework too far, and then fixed it).
The success of the campaign immediately drove Newell to sign onto another two upcoming campaigns for Back To School and Off To College.
Concept; Design; Front-end Development
During my time at ESPN, I became the owner of the ESPN Radio monthly sweepstakes. Previously, the sweepstakes had always been built within the shell of the ESPN site, as seen in this past example (excuse the header, the site has since been updated). I decided to break outside of the standard shell and create little mini-sites for each sweepstakes. The clients loved it, and kept coming back for more.
View examples:
• Mike & Mike Bracket Challenge 2013
• Mike & Mike Bracket Challenge 2014
• Lumber Liquidators Hardwood Half-Court Sweepstakes
Examples of logos and illustrative graphics.
