Description

Reimagining CareerBuilder: A Brand Refresh with Heart and Vision

🤌🏽 Target Audience

To effectively engage these audience segments, CareerBuilder continued to focus on delivering a user-friendly and efficient platform that addresses the unique needs of each group. Marketing efforts included targeted advertising, content marketing, social media campaigns, and email marketing, with messaging tailored to the specific pain points and goals of each target audience. Additionally, strategic partnerships with industry associations, educational institutions, and other relevant organizations helped broaden the platform’s reach and credibility.

🎯 KPI Goals

Our goal was to help the CareerBuilder brand begin the transition into a more playful and positive brand on both the client and business side. By continuing to close the gap between their very silo’d brand approach to B2B and B2C we could begin to create a cohesive brand across both channels. As leadership shifted, changed and refocused it became clear that a total rebrand would be in the future for CareerBuilder. The brand refresh was designed to serve as a stepping stone for the brand’s future evolution, laying a solid foundation for ongoing change and growth. We especially focused on developing social media vibes and tones that could grow along with future marketing strategies.

The new brand refresh was applied to a variety of mediums that allowed to showcase a different side of CareerBuilder. From presentation decks to social media posts and e-books, the brand refresh pushed the brand in a more vibrant visual direction and an overall more approachable positioning.

Updating Brand Standardization for the Future

📌 Brief

CareerBuilder was having a bit of an identity crisis. The brand was being diluted across divisions, they were losing track of their target audience (which is why the video above was produced to test the waters) and the new leadership really hated the brand logo. They needed things to be both quickly updated and set up for a brand transition but also organized and implemented in the current channels to keep the current brand from becoming diluted.

💡 Creative Solutions

During my tenure at CareerBuilder, my team and I initiated a strategic brand refresh, steering clear of a full-scale rebranding to maintain the essence of the company during its transition. Our focus was to enhance the existing strengths of the brand and align it with modern market trends while preserving its core identity. We introduced a refined color palette, placing emphasis on a more singular color scheme in our logo usage to establish a distinct and memorable visual identity. This strategic shift represented a new, playful yet professional direction for CareerBuilder, closely tied to its mission of connecting job seekers with opportunities. By redefining and communicating the brand’s ‘big why’, we crafted a narrative that resonated with both clients and businesses, solidifying CareerBuilder’s position as a dynamic leader in the job market.

A YouTube Pre-Roll Ad with Over 5 million Views

📌 Brief

CareerBuilder faced a unique challenge: create an impactful pre-roll ad on a tight budget and timeline. The VP of Marketing’s urgent request was clear – engage and convert viewers into potential customers, despite the constraints of past commercial losses.

Pre-roll ads, known for their effectiveness in heightening brand awareness and driving conversions, presented an ideal solution. These ads reach viewers when their engagement is at its peak, making them a strategic tool for amplifying brand presence. We quickly put together three storyboard options to present to the VP of Marketing.

The mission? In one week, create an engaging ad that could convert casual viewers into potential customers during a crucial buyout process for the company in order to position CareerBuilder as an even more enticing purchase. The VP of marketing also wanted to seize current market opportunities while staying competitive and since Youtube pre-roll video ads are especially effective across several metrics, including brand awareness, brand engagement, brand favorability, and in this case, purchase intent, this needed to be done quickly.

Alongside the design director, and supported by compelling research about pre-roll ads’ effectiveness, we hustled. Despite the tight timeline, we harnessed our creativity and insights to deliver. Once we realized the benefits would be huge for the brand I suggested we source found footage (in order to save on actors and on set equipment). I partnered with the senior copy writer and we worked up three concepts based on a series of found footages, illustrations, and a simple sign off card.

✏️ Video Storyboarding

Version 1 explored human emotion. We all know job searching is exhausting. What if someone else did it for you? CareerBuilder had gone through a lot of changes 20 years up to this point. What remained was a steadfast certainty that they could help job seekers.

Version 2 focused on the concept of change. I wanted to use a mixture of motion graphics, animations, as well as video for this concept. This storyboard led with a sense of humor and an unexpected storyline.

Version 3 was a more technology centered approach. I wanted to highlight the search engine’s optimization technology. The call to action here was a direct reference to the url. This was the more moody visual of all three approaches and would rely on motion graphics to propel the story.

📺 Final Ad

The final product may not have been perfect, but it was necessary, timely, and emblematic of our ability to deliver under pressure. So here it was, our rapid response to an urgent brief: a testament to the power of agility and team work. In the end the final product garnered over 5 million views and thousands of new quality leads to the CareerBuilder website.

⚡️ Visual Design

After updating the brand standards it became a lot easier to identify areas where we could flex the brand’s look, tone, and feel while exploring more energetic and joyful energies along the way. With the help of the creative team, I implemented the new color usages, cleaner design aesthetics, simplified typography, and photography standards across channels and mediums.

3. Experiential (Spacial) Design

The transformation of in-person events at CareerBuilder embraced a more playful, dynamic approach to branding. This fresh initiative aimed to help attendees personally connect with the brand, infusing a sense of inclusivity and relatability. This was achieved through interactive elements like engaging event games, unique marketing materials, and innovative interactions involving AI and real-life interactions, all complemented by exciting prizes. This approach not only enlivened the events but also fostered a deeper, more personal connection between the brand and its audience.

Details

Role Sr. Art Director
Date March 2018

Categories: BrandingMotionVideo