Twitter - What’s Happening

In 2016, Twitter had a perception problem. Despite 90% global awareness, most people still saw it as a social network, not the real-time news platform its users knew it to be. Brand consideration in the US was flat. Growth had stalled.

As Global Head of Brand, I led the strategy behind a re-imagination of Twitter's brand, and an accompanying out-of-home campaign as a first expression of this brand strategy, that would become the most awarded outdoor work in the world that year.

The concept was painfully simple. Overlay the hashtag onto powerful photojournalistic images - from Black Lives Matter to the US election, climate change to Pride - letting the # do what it had always done on the platform: frame the world's most important conversations. No tagline. No copy. Just the image, the hashtag, and the bird, to represent Twitter as the platform for “what’s happening” in the world, and what everyone was talking about.

The campaign ran across billboards in major US cities, and was created entirely in-house at Twitter - no external agency. It won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Outdoor (one of two Grand Prix awarded in the category that year, alongside McCann's 'Fearless Girl'), plus ten additional prizes and multiple Gold Lions. It also won a D&AD Yellow Pencil.

The campaign drove a 25% increase in awareness of Twitter as a real-time information source, and was the first step in a strategy that resulted in +48% brand consideration in the US, and +60% daily active users globally over a 3 year period - re-accelerating a growth trajectory that had been dormant for years.