Project reviewNordicTrack Social Ad Campaign
With the majority of their annual revenue generated over the holiday season, NordicTrack needed a quick, low-cost solution to drive awareness and consideration—targeting primarily a social media audience.
My role was the principle designer, animator, image editor and creative strategist.
The challenge.
Repurposing, largely existing, assets to communicate the primary selling feature of the NordicTrack experience—working out with trainers in interesting and exotic locations all around the world. Secondary, or less direct messaging, was that of experiencing these workouts on quality products from treadmills to bikes to rowers.
My solution.
The universal challenge with social media advertising is communicating a lot in a tiny little chunk. The main competitive advantage of NordicTrack was its novel experience of trainer led workouts in thousands of exotic locations, so, for the user, you never have to do the same workout twice, there is always something new, something interesting. The idea of “hyperlapse” (transitioning in a series of relevant videos) began to take shape.
Initially I tried just having the beauty of the scenery tell the story, but soon scratched that idea and added trainers in every frame to show that these are guided workouts, not just a pretty picture.
There was still something missing though, often the experience itself not showcasing the quality of the product—it was that union of product and experience that was appealing. Something that later transitioned to the rest of the website emerged the idea of “blue world.” Rather that having the equipment shot on a stark white frame, I experimented and created a dark blue background and image tones that visually made the equipment appear more premium…less generic. This visual approach I later integrated into the website, adding visually cohesion from ad to shopping cart.
I edited the full product line, including transparencies in a Figma doc to be used by other designers as a result of just getting assets video ready.
Lacking the time an resources for a full-fledged story telling campaign, I still needed to make the ads heavily sales centric as we went into the holiday season, so added end-cards with prices that would change depending on the stage of the campaign.
Results
In total I created over 150 ads in both 1x1 and 9x16 aspect ratios that were featured in both the US and Canada. They ended up the best performing social media ads they have ever launched. As with most things at Nordictrack it was a crazy, fast, chaotic ride that kept me up most nights.
The team.
It’s always a team effort. A big shout out to the sales and social teams for being in the trenches with me and making sure I could spend the bulk of my time playing with the moving pixels.