Since their launch in 2009, WeTransfer has been devoted to supporting art and creativity as a key part of its file sharing business model, showcasing artwork on its full-bleed background images and supporting artistic endeavors through direct funding. After nearly ten years of giving the spotlight to artists, they came to Stink Studios looking to develop their first large-scale brand communications campaign with the goal of growing their U.S. user base.
Through initial stakeholder interviews and strategy development, we found that WeTransfer’s role as a humble facilitator of creativity has informed everything they do. We worked with them to develop a deliberately simple tagline to match their deliberately simple service.
The “You make. We transfer.” campaign is all about supporting creatives and artists throughout the ebbs and flows of their creative process. In digital and social platforms, we highlighted the work of artists, peeking into their process and contrasting WeTransfer’s simplicity with the complex, nonlinear journey of creativity.
YouTube preroll placements utilized our tagline's framework to tell stories of making and doing across a variety of creative disciplines, illustrating that no matter what you make, we transfer.
We celebrated the creative process in a whole new way for the brand’s first out-of-home campaign in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick. In hand-painted placements, we posted screenshots of the actual email thread between the artist Kelela and WeTransfer about the creative that would eventually go up. After 2 weeks, we refreshed all the creative with a set of photographs provided by Kelela.
We also designed a limited run of billboards and painted walls featuring the work of photographer Carolina Mizrahi in Portland, OR.
We took the campaign to print with bold, type-driven executions that further explored the nuances of creativity, positioning WeTransfer as its simple, humble supporter.
As part of the campaign launch we scripted a series of open-ended live read podcast ads, on creatively-minded shows like 99% Invisible, Song Exploder, Accidental Creative, TED, and Reply-All. The excerpt below is taken from Accidental Creative: Get Momentum.
The campaign was extended into WeTransfer brand initiatives throughout the year, from Spotify playlists and custom wallpapers to a sign off on our Into Action and A Message From Earth collaborations.
The campaign gave WeTransfer a bold new public voice, the opportunity to support creatives on a whole new level, and a chance to get credit for their good deeds along the way.
Our campaign reflected a marked improvement across key brand perception drivers in trustworthiness, inspiration, innovation, simplicity/ease of use and relevance. Exposure to our campaign reflected a marked improvement in each, ranging from +26% (trustworthiness) to +52.6% (simplicity/ease of use).
- Silver Cube – Integrated Campaign