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Square Voice – Role: Creative Lead and Copywriter
For years, we told the Square product story with actors and testimonials, but had never spoken for ourselves. In 2016, we developed an art direction with bold colors, mixed media, and stop-motion animation that we could use as a vehicle to tell our story in an iconic way. The campaign was a success, increasing signups, activations, and interest in new SAAS products. All in all, the campaign extended to more than 20 videos, social media executions, and direct mail pieces that ran globally for nearly two years as the SQ stock price rose over 400% during the run of the campaign. Art Director: Emmett Dzieza. Director: Adam Patch. |
| :30 Broadcast spots We produced six spots to run over the span of the campaign, each focusing on simple assertions that Square was fast, or easy, or reliable. They were written modularly, so we could swap different gags and value propositions in and out easily. Then we localized them for four different global markets where product functionality, currency, and language varied slightly by region. |
| Direct Mail Direct mail at Square was always extremely data-driven. We applied this new art direction to our tested value propositions and created a piece so successful, it beat out all other challengers for the next two years. People just want to know that they can get paid fast. |
| Social This look and feel was also just right for a social environment. We produced static and carousel posts for Facebook, and cut short video gags for Vine. It was a thing back then—stories didn't exist yet. In this example below, the first four tiles were all gifs, so we could see the swipe, dip, tap, and the super easy slam dunk in action. |
| Marketing Website We carried the look and feel of the campaign over to our home page, and then applied the same art direction to each of our product pages. Products were assigned a color which was applied to the hero image and the iconography on the page. Click any header to see a higher resolution view of that page. It's likely that I wrote each one, though I'm not entirely sure anymore. |
| Why Square To explain where this campaign came from in the first place, we were asked to create a series of tutorial videos on an extremely tight budget. This was where the idea for our colorful world first came from, and the success of these instructional videos is what earned us a chance to make the full campaign. The first video was linked from the Square home page, and the awesome affect it had on our signups is shown below. |
| Getting Started with Square Reader We started making so many videos in this style that I was given the chance to direct a tutorial myself. This was a video that needed to stand alone on its own, but was also designed to be broken into four smaller videos as well. We had to forecast shots to show different functionality in our four different global markets and prepare for localization in English, King's English, Spanish, and Canadian-French. Preproduction was dense and complicated, but we came through with flying colors. What a fun chance to combine live action, with stop motion, with animation, with CG renders of our device. |
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