Since their founding in 2009, WeTransfer has supported artists and creativity as part of their file sharing business model. 30% of the background images served on their homepage are given freely to artists, recently resulting in over 1 billion impressions per year. After nearly ten years of giving the spotlight to artists, they sought 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 sought to highlight WeTransfer’s humble support of creativity and its simple approach to file sharing. The campaign presents the brand as a vessel for creativity, giving the spotlight to artists, whose work is featured prominently throughout.

WeTransfer’s goal was to increase brand awareness in the U.S., especially among their target audience of creatives and creative professionals.

The design solution evokes simplicity and transparency in its spareness, allowing significant space for the work of artists. Combinations of type, color and image gave the brand a consistent and singular look and feel, flexing to fit in a range of placements. The campaign display typeface, ITC Grouch, has since become a key element of the brand’s visual identity.

Creative included out-of-home placements in two U.S. cities, bespoke print ads, contextually-targeted social media content, text-based contextual pre-roll animations, and a content partnership with The FADER.

The campaign garnered 96.4 million impressions, 5.1 million video views and 2.3 million click-throughs.

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).