PROJECT
GNOMON
MY ROLE
MARKETING DIRECTION
BRAND MANAGEMENT
CREATIVE DIRECTION
GRAPHIC DESIGN
CONTENT CREATION
LANDING PAGES
PRODUCER
EMAIL
SOCIAL
SUMMARY
I was responsible for marketing design, UX and brand management
CONTENT MARKETING
1 Million Views in 1 Year
Through my viral video strategy I helped a production studio send a student short video to one million views within one year on YouTube.
ABOUT THE VIDEO
“UFO Over Santa Clarita” is a CGI exercise in photorealism. While most assumed that the UFO’s must be CGI while everything else was live-action, in reality everything is computer generated. The sky is a digital matte painting wrapped on a semi-sphere. The car, its driver, the bushes, and even the flock of birds are all animated CG models. The sun is a hand tracked digital flare with associated lens aberrations and smudges. Everything is fake.
The hoax video was directed by Aristomenis (Meni) Tsirbas of MeniThings Productions in partnership with the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. While Meni was responsible for direction, animation and lighting, a crew of talented Gnomon School students were assigned concept design, modeling and texturing for this all-CGI photo real VFX experiment.
WHERE MY SKILLS CAME IN
Just like any good piece of well crafted content. If no one knows about it or sees it, then it is really hard to gauge its value. So it was my responsibility as the Creative Advertising Director to make sure as many people would see this as possible. It was actually crafted as a viral video, but forcing something to go viral doesn't usually work. Unless you have the help from WIRED.
After several weeks of barely any views on YouTube, I was brought in to try to boost views and engagement.
With my outreach and pitch to writers and bloggers all over the web (this is pre-influencer days) Meni's video was able to get a feature plug on WIRED. The article ended up being a big hit and helped sky rocket views immediately.
It then spread to blogs and site all over the internet creating a domino effect for engagement and views.
Original story on WIRED
The UFO Is Fake in Animator’s YouTube Prank — But So Is Everything Else
THE SPIKE THAT CAME AFTER
That title really made a statement that caught on as major news websites such as ABC, Huffington Post, MSN and numerous other major network affiliates also featured the story on their home pages and blogs in days that followed.
“I worked with Bob on the marketing efforts for the video I directed and co-created with the students of Gnomon School, ‘UFO Over Santa Clarita’. Bob’s efforts in getting the word out to the major internet “trend-setter” Wired.com was crucial to the success of making it go viral. After WIRED released their feature story about the video we saw the views skyrocket to nearly one million views in six months. Bob knows the importance of creating strong partnerships with writers and advertisers of trend-setting websites to help get videos going viral.”
CREATING ‘MEGA’ BRAND AWARENESS IN THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY
20K VIEWS IN ONE DAY
Produced a viral commercial with video game centric production team MEGA64. To focus on targeting the ‘gamer’ demographic. I was responsible for creative direction and project managing the video from start to finish.
THE PROBLEM
Gnomon was well known in the visual effects and movie industry. That was not the case among gamers in the video game industry.
This was a very large portion of Gnomon’s key market audience that was over-looked by the company for a long time.
THE STRATEGY
I really wanted to create a viral video ad that would somehow connect with Gnomon School’s main demographic of males 18-24 that are really into nerdy humor and video games. Up until the point of creating this short video Gnomon's campaigns had always been, "safe", "boring", "by the book". Let's just say not very adventurous or risky.
So I teamed up with video game industry indie comedy troupe Mega64 who is most famous for their live funny video game parody skits. To do a short 2 minute viral video to show the school in a cool new way.
Something a little more unconventional that would actually reach out and grab our audience's attention. I wanted to do a sort of anti-advertising campaign that would pit a fake competitor school against our own.
THE RESULTS
It was Gnomon’s most effective and highly viewed video to date.
100k views in the first week
Built brand awareness among the video gamer audience.
Cost effective — Made within a budget of $5k
Based on marketing survey results, Gnomon had at least 10 new students sign up for the full-time 2-year program. [Equivalent to $750,000 in gross revenue]
3D work by Tom Heyerman
MORE PARTNERSHIPS
FORMED
In 2011 and 2012 I strategized with Gnomon’s PR department to partner up with Freddie Wong and RocketJump to film parts of the hit NETFLIX series Video Game High School on the Gnomon campus in exchange for online advertising in their episodes.
TARGETED MARKETING CAMPAIGN STRATEGY
LANDING PAGES
Lead a team to strategize and implement the company’s first trackable online ad campaign. This consisted of custom tailored ads and landing pages geared to 9 different user personas.
The company had no process that was trackable for their online advertising campaigns. We needed to create funnels for the online advertising efforts, both paid and search.
THE PROBLEM
RESEARCH METHODS
Student interviews
Prototype testing
Personas
Market research
Information Architecture
Customer Funnels
THE WORK
Step 1
Defined user personas to allow us to start the design process for the online banner and landing page ad campaigns.
Step 2
Delegate design tasks to the design team. Defined key art, buttons, colors, typography, and overall look and feel
Step 3
Setup and analyze results of Google Ad, keywords, funnels, experiments and overall campaign settings and budget allocation to make the necessary changes and improvements to further ROI.
This resulted in increased overall site traffic and generated hundreds of thousands of more qualified click throughs. The conversion rate for visitors who filled out the lead gen form increased by over 200%. Sending out more targeted ads resulted in less confusion and less call-in to the customer service team.
THE RESULTS
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