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A year in Creative for Digital PR | iProspect

For those working in creative fields, 2020 presented unique challenges as to how we worked, created and collaborated, whilst adjusting to the ‘new normal’. Our Design and Development team - the creative executional arm of iProspect’s Digital PR team - collectively had to tweak the way in which they delivered content. It was more vital than ever that the content we produced aligned with the way journalists wanted branded stories pitched to them. As we enter a new year, in similar circumstances, we take a look back at how last year shaped the way we worked and how it will inform and steer our work into 2021. 

The challenges

The rapidly changing landscape and news agenda of 2020 meant that any content that attempted to align with real-world events was often out of date or irrelevant by the time it was ready for outreach.

It was also clear that journalists and publishers were oversaturated with topical content and there was a desire for escapism, for something abstract that was a break from the never-ending COVID-19 news flow.

To meet these challenges head on and continue to deliver for our clients we needed to ensure we could deliver timely, relevant and most importantly, stand out creative to bring our content to life, in record time.

We rose to the challenges and below we share our favourite campaigns of last year.

Our three favourite campaigns of 2020

On the theme of escapism, in 2020 we saw great results with image lead campaigns that feature photo-realistic, inspiring interiors, such as this campaign for Neville Johnson which explored famous historical figures’ bedrooms to illustrate how they could look if they were created in the modern day.

We worked with a 3D artist to create a set of images that captured the feeling of each figure from history, including (below) Coco Chanel, Jimi Hendrix and William Shakespeare. We wanted to make sure that even without knowing which figure they represented, readers could identify the famous figure, through clever use of ‘easter eggs’ such as the dagger and skulls in Shakespeare’s room, or the Chanel handbag in her bedroom suite.

A year in Creative for Digital PR - Bedroom 

Our next campaign gave us an opportunity to work closely with our research team to create an original, data-based campaign that due to its subject matter proved a success with design press including coverage on It’s Nice That, which for a creative team is an accolade we’re very proud of.

The Currency in Colour campaign for Money.co.uk analysed 157 currencies from across the globe, to explore the dominant colours and features of notes equivalent to a £20 note. The data was displayed in an interactive map, a swatch grid that was sortable by hue and A-Z, plus further analysis of note features, culminating in the creation of a ‘global note’ that included the most common features of all currencies combined.

What was unique about the approach to this campaign is how our developers worked with the research team on the data, using code to filter the colours thus saving a large amount of time in design. The creative team stayed close to the idea from the start, which played a vital part in shaping the final delivery of the campaign.

A year in Creative for Digital PR - Money Map

A year in Creative for Digital PR - Money Note

Our final pick of creative campaigns that have seen success in 2020 is the The Art of Playing Cards for BetVictor, which allowed us to create a series of five playing card designs, inspired by the work of four famous 20th Century artists: Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Banksy.

We made sure that we paid attention to specific card features of traditional card designs and included them in our modern re-workings. The campaign production was also unique and worked on by three members of the design team who were assigned specific artists to imitate based on their working style and skillset, enabling us to get the very best out of each designer.

This approach coupled with a clean, simple page build with eye-catching card animations, made for a well-crafted piece of content that was able to secure links from not just poker and casino sites, but lifestyle and design sites too.

A year in Creative for Digital PR - BV cards

In summary

2020 has brought unique challenges to creative teams - not just the obvious challenges of how to stay creative, motivated and continue to produce great content and reach journalists, but also the more nuanced, practical challenges that arise from a change in where we work and how we communicate.

While it has been far from smooth sailing, what the year has taught us is that it is vital for us as a creative team to stay close – closer than we may have been in the past - to the end-to-end development of a campaign including ideation, research and outreach, in order to be working to our very best. Looking forward to seeing what 2021 brings in the creative space.