WISTIA’S GEAR SQUAD VS DR. BORING
Role: Growth Designer, Marketing
Gear Squad vs Dr. Boring is an original Wistia-produced cartoon series born out of one core idea: Defeat B2B Marketing Boring.
With so many opinions around B2B marketing—the main being that it’s generally stale and conventional—Wistia set out to create a comedic series that highlights the pain points of marketers within the SaaS space and how they can leverage creativity and innovation to take their marketing to the next level.
Wistia leadership naturally wanted to create buzz around the series and tasked the larger marketing team to create a campaign to help encourage viral viewing, with the following launch goals:
Reach, build, and retain an audience of thousands who are hooked on Gear Squad and eager to deepen their engagement with Wistia.
Hero the creativity of Wistia customers and reaffirm the Wistia brand as a champion for and industry leader in creative marketing.
Building off the above, the team unified the campaign around 4 benchmarks:
Promote binge-watching: Gear Squad’s core watch experience will not be gated, and it will allow viewers to watch all five episodes at launch.
Lean into the Saturday morning cartoon vibe: The marketing campaign will incorporate true events that are best experienced live, invoking the appointment viewing of linear TV.
Encourage viral viewing
Surprise and delight: The marketing campaign will strive to be just as unexpected as the show itself, showing up in traditional marketing channels in novel ways. We’ll curate a Saturday morning cartoon-themed swag kit for Wistia super fans.
Equip customers with new tools: Fun commercials produced by Studios to be placed between each episode and direct viewers to related resources while still feeling native to the Gear Squad viewing experience.
Support the defeat boring theme
Working with a team of marketing designers, we utilized assets that were built out upon initial production of the series to create a refined type system and color palette to help guide all of the work to be produced across this campaign.
I focused on the design of top-of-funnel launch emails and organic social assets. I also led the art direction and design of the swag kits.
To create excitement around the launch, the team came up with the idea to give away swag kits. Tapping into the 90’s Saturday Morning aesthetic, kits would leave a fun physical component of the launch in the hands of influencers as well as fans of Wistia and the series.
Creation of the swag kits included sourcing domestic/international vendors for production, design of all items, overseeing QA, final assembly of boxes, and shipping to select influencers.
Dr. Boring is boring. He’s not really a fan of innovative marketing and is more than ready to challenge anyone (or anything) that wants to challenge the status quo.
For this part of the campaign, the brand and creative team imagined a world in which Dr. Boring childishly hijacks Wistia’s social accounts and promotes his theories around uninspiring marketing—with the goal of generating interest in the series. For the social takeover, I created organic assets to support: profile photos, banner graphics for FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, and IG.
Email has always played a big part in engaging prospects for Wistia video and podcasting software. And so, growth designed a strategy around email to help bring awareness to the launch of the series.
Utilizing assets that our team had built out and working alongside copy, I helped create emails that would not only speak to the launch of Gear Squad vs Dr. Boring, but also shed light on net-new resources that the Wistia team launched—specifically the Asset Library.
Wistia’s Asset Library is a net-new resource created with the intent of sharing rights-free assets to help B2B/SaaS marketers create unique and inspiring content. Assets included music, video frames, device, templates, animations and more.
High-level view of additional creative produced for the launch of the series
Metrics & outcomes: Within the first 30 days of the launch, the series had reached 1.33M people across platforms, received a total of 5.7K series plays, 17.8K visitors to the series LP, and a few great follows on social, including Hulu.
Overall, visitors of the series watched the first episode two of the series then took a visit to the Asset Library or Guide to Social Media. The team concluded that the series was seen as a stepping stone for marketers and creatives looking for technical/video production assistance and advice.
