OBJECTIVE 🎯
Adobe asked us to create a TikTok and Instagram series that builds brand love amongst Gen Z.
CHALLENGE 💥
As we got cooking, we acknowledged an immediate challenge – on platforms as creative as TikTok and Instagram, how do we break through the noise to show our audience something they actually want to see? What can we create that doesn’t feel like an ad and drives excitement?
INSIGHT ⚡
Fortunately for us, we uncovered that creatives love visual transformations with before/afters, and that Gen Z in particular connects well with content centered around community efforts.
IDEA 🧠
*Millennial pause* The series ‘Redesigning Signs in NYC’ was born. In the series (that garnered such reactions as “I didn’t even realize this was an ad!” and “I want 100 more videos of this”), we partnered with Max Kolomatsky, Brooklyn-based designer and social creator, to use Adobe’s design tools to revamp local ads around New York City, delighting fans with tales about a man with a van, a dog poop sign and more. By authentically weaving the Adobe product into stories about funny street ads and the people behind them, we found a creative way to connect our audience to a community – and even left that community a bit more beautiful than we found it.
RESULTS 🚀
People went f*cking crazy for the series. We earned write-ups in the Washington Post and Future Social hailing the series as an example of the “perfect Tiktok”, and fans called it criminal if we ended with just one video. So we listened, and made more. Across four culture-driving videos, Redesigning Signs garnered 6.3 million organic views on TikTok (10.2M across platforms) with an average of 1.56M views per video in the series (36X average Adobe platform benchmark) and 11% engagement rate, which was +156% above benchmark. On Instagram, the series received a total of 4.1M views, with an average of slightly more than 1M views per video. The engagement rate across the series was 8%, significantly surpassing the platform benchmark by over 3000% for an account of that size. But the best part? Max became a local hero in the creative community, helping individuals and businesses by bringing awareness to their causes. As for us, we achieved our goal of growing Adobe fan love with content that entertained first and advertised second. Pretty, pretty good.
