At-Bay Report Ad Campaign - Media Buy

With email-based attacks representing the primary vector for cybersecurity breaches, At-Bay developed the comprehensive "Email Security Report" to position itself as a thought leader while providing actionable insights to businesses facing evolving digital threats.

Design Opportunity

Our digital advertising campaign faced multifaceted challenges that required careful navigation:

  • Driving meaningful engagement with a technical security report in a crowded digital landscape

  • Translating complex cybersecurity concepts into visually compelling narratives that would resonate with both technical and business audiences - Balancing educational content with persuasive marketing to position At-Bay as an authoritative voice

  • Maintaining brand consistency and visual impact across diverse ad formats, dimensions, and platform requirements

  • Converting technical subject matter into accessible visuals without oversimplifying critical security concepts

  • Ensuring performance optimization across multiple digital channels with varying audience behaviors

My Role

As Lead Designer, I directed both the creative vision and strategic approach for this campaign, translating complex security concepts into visually compelling ad creatives optimized for performance across multiple digital channels.

Key Collaborators

  • Lead Copywriter: Partnership on message development and technical accuracy

  • Digital Marketing Lead: Collaboration on platform strategy and performance optimization

Executive Stakeholders

  • Chief Marketing Officer: Alignment with overall marketing strategy

  • Senior Director of Corporate Marketing and Brand: Guidance on brand consistency and positioning

Ad Run & Goals

Ad Placement

  • Semafor: News outlet founded by Justin B Smith (Bloomberg) and Ben Smith (New York Times, BuzzFeed News)

  • Audience: C-suite executives, policymakers, and opinion leaders

Goals

  • 80K impressions

  • 0.32% CTR

Inspiration

For the previous 2 years we ran our ads on the Axios Codebook newsletter. The following ads were our top performing from our previous runs. We used the previous ads as an inspiration for creative and copy. Both ads used “short, eye-catching copy” and iconography visual element.

Building & Testing the Ads

Working closely with At-Bay copywriters and our Chief Marketing Officer, we decided to test two different visual look and feels. The first would use iconography, similar to what we ran on Axios Codebook. The second visual look and feel would be the cover of our “At-Bay Rankings Report”.

In addition to the visual test, we tested 3 different sets of copy. Each of these were variations on email security and different CTAs.

Final versions of ads produced, across the 2 visual directions and 3 different copy versions.

Performance

  • Impressions: 180K across all ads

  • CTR: 1.2X higher than Semafor average

  • Best performing unit:

    • 300x600 size, Visual A/Copy A

    • CTR of 0.38%