Challenges & Goals

How do you make a software feature exciting? Even the most groundbreaking software features are hard to communicate. But for product, interaction and motion designers and developers, ProtoPie 5.0 really does break new ground, solving two of the biggest issues in the interaction design process: collaboration and handoff between designers and engineers. It would also be the biggest release in the history of the company, a realization of their vision for the future of interactive prototyping and the catalyst for significant growth in the North American market.

Insights & Strategy

Strategy is as much about defining what you aren’t doing as what you are. The launch of ProtoPie 5.0 exemplifies that. Our launch campaign isn’t about convincing our audience that prototyping is crucial. The designers, developers and teams we’re targeting already know that. Speaking to them directly through 20+ stakeholder interviews confirmed that. The interviews also told us that we don’t need to tell them that product design is complicated, or that there’s lots of miscommunication in the process, or even that they would benefit from a better tool. They know those things. They’re already screaming about these issues. What we had to do was to understand the tie that binds all these issues: that every day, in almost every type of design collaboration, too much is left to interpretation.

 Our approach? 

Communicate that ProtoPie 5.0 leaves nothing to interpretation.

We built a campaign that doesn’t say “here’s the value of this feature”, but one that says: “here’s what you’ve been asking for, and it’s even clearer and more useful than you imagined.” Building from the brand language (files are called “Pies”), we named the feature “Interaction Recipes”. That’s what we’re offering – all the details, effects, variables and guidance needed to go from design to real, developed products.

Execution

The campaign was anchored by a live-action film. The concept was built around a product design team viewing a classic tech CEO keynote speech (given by Tony Kim, ProtoPie’s CEO, in his native Korean). The new product features are so clear in their value, it doesn’t matter that no one on the design team speaks Korean. It’s just that clear. We produced 45s, 30s and 15s edits of this film to fit a variety of media placements.

The fully integrated product campaign didn’t stop with our hero film. We developed multiple series of animated display ads and social ads, using ad sequencing and retargeting to bring prospective ProtoPie users through the purchase funnel. Our team also handled the media and public relations for the campaign, negotiating full-site takeovers on TechCrunch, Dribbble, VentureBeat and Wired, key publications for our target audiences. We also implemented on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, writing custom InMail messages targeted to our designer audience profile. We also handled PR for the campaign, writing a series of op-eds and securing podcast placements on four separate design-oriented podcasts during the active campaign period.

What’s more, the entire film and key assets for the campaign were produced during COVID-19 in under 3 weeks start to finish, working on location in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Seoul, South Korea with post-production handled in Toronto.

Results & Impact

The campaign was an unbridled success.

We drove 7.2M impressions, 842k video views with a view-through rate of 18.2% and 17.5k clicks to the ProtoPie website. We secured multiple earned media opportunities from op-eds to podcasts. Most importantly, this translated to a massive increase in sales: a 264% increase in revenue over the same period in the previous year.