Maybe the biggest barrier in delivering highly creative output is the combination of time pressure from ridiculous deadlines and perfectionist art directors slowing down the creative process.

So to bring this universal nuisance and hurdles to creativity for our core audience to life, we placed the most well known creative industry stereotype as our hero: the Hovering Art Director (HAD). Famous for having more ideas than any designer can keep up with, micromanaging and taking up time with last minute improvements.

With speed as the core benefit, the tagline ‘Keep up with hovering art directors. Make it with Adobe Stock.’ called to action throughout a series of activities, from light-hearted entertaining to more serious and inspiring.

As Adobe focusses on the creative community, the execution is ‘design first’.

We created an online film called “The Hovering Art Director” (HAD). This short mockumentary portrays a designer being hovered over by a stereotype art director. With Adobe Stock and his Photoshop skills, he delivers an outstanding key visual for a new ginger beer brand.

The ad from the film not only became an advertisement for Adobe Stock. It was subject of a series of webinars showing how software, skills and Adobe Stock enables both speed and outstanding work.

To further push the HAD-phenomenon, we followed up with a designer toy. The collectible comes in Adobe-branded packaging and features an inbuilt speaker with 18 lines of pure wisdom. The action figure was sent to design departments world wide. To generate more leads, we launched a website that awards an action figure to the most original and outrageous HAD-quotes.

Reach

We managed to qualitatively reach over a million people from the creative industry worldwide (in completed video views).

Engagement

Not only did we managed to reach them, we also engaged them around the product: we had an engagement rate of 7.2%, over seven times higher than the industry average, with a positive sentiment on all three target groups (99% positive score) and a social view completion rate twice the benchmark. Over 3000 designers willingly put an Adobe-branded design toy on their desk, so the toy can be seen as the ultimate foot-in-the-door item.

Conversion

This converted into 11% leads, and the webinars attracted nearly 700% more participants than strived for.

Besides all that, one thing’s for sure: there is no valid reason to complain about not being able to keep up with hovering art directors anymore.