Ascential | The Work | Project lead

‘YouTube for Creatives’

Leading a combined Made by Many and Ascential design/development team, we created and launched ‘The Work’. Built upon the phenomenal archive of Cannes Lions winners and submissions, this subscription service is the place for advertising creatives to be inspired all year round.

£1.52m

increase in revenue in launch year

56%

increase in subscriptions from the previous year

75%

ROI in launch year alone

Cannes Lions has the largest archive of the best creative advertising in the world - over 250,000 campaigns and growing. Whilst this archive has been digitised, traffic was massively skewered to the weeks surrounding the festival and product was difficult to use. Could this unique content be used to meet the needs of the creative industry in new and inspiring ways?

We started by discovering the needs of potential users and where the best opportunities for growth lay. After speaking to an internationally diverse range of creatives, strategists, marketers and branding agencies, it was decided to focus on helping creatives do their jobs better.

The new service was designed, built and launched in just 9 months. I led the project from proposal through to launch, from planning to playbacks, and from ideation to finished features. Throughout this time I balanced Ascential’s business objectives whilst designing for a demanding and discerning customer base.

The service has many thousands of users, including several global holding companies that have memberships across their entire networks. The success of the project was driven by great teamwork, the right environment and continuous stakeholder collaboration.

01. High-level strategy

Cannes own data demonstrated the product opportunity: 1 million people engaged directly with Cannes online yet only 0.49% of this audience was monetised. The majority of this engagement happened during the award festival and immediately afterwards. What if we could create a new proposition that drove 365 engagement?

02. Sketch provocations

We conducted 3 rounds of rigorous user research with 45 people to understand how they perform at their best, what their pain points and how a new product could address their needs. A set of sketch provocations helped point towards a primary focus of a product for creatives, with a powerful search feature at the core.

03. The core proposition

These foundation pages formed the backbone of the service, and were built by a combined agency/client design and development team. Over 9 months and working in two week sprints, we iterated both the product and the full ‘innovation stack’ (such as marketing, organisational factor and process development).

04. Continuous, iterative customer research

Driven by our customer scenarios, we constantly tested throughout the project. This led to key insights as to how we should design, build and prioritise features, reinforcing the business case as we went.

05. Crafting utility

For the MVP, a lot of the thought went into the tools that would make the archive a valuable tool from launch. An essential feature was the ability to create and save boards of found work for inspiration and project reference. These interaction flows were created to explain the functionality to the client and development team.

06. Love The Work

The visual design allowed the award-winning creative work to always be the hero. This refined simplicity - and a focus on careful information design and delightful interaction touches - gave the product a premium feel that matched its high price point and value. In addition, curated collections and membership features were built in to provide additional hooks for year-round use.

07. Launching at Cannes

The Work went live the week of the festival and immediately saw a massive spike in subscriber numbers. We attended the festival to help sell the product and hear feedback direct from customers old and new.

08. Knowledge share

This phase of the project concluded with sharing the lessons we’d learnt from working with an external brand agency (a rarity for Made by Many). I created this deck to codify the experience and help any future client/agency collaborations run smoothly.