At-Bay Paid Ads

Promoting the At-Bay Email Security Report, we ran ads to drive brand awareness and engagement on the importance of email security.

Design Problem: At-Bay faced the strategic challenge of creating a digital ad campaigns that would effectively communicate value of reading the “At-Bay Email Security Report” but also the importance of email security. The campaign needed to balance technical topic while maintaining consistent brand messaging across varying ad formats.

Role: Lead Designer, creative direction & strategy

Collaborators: Lead Copywriter & Digital Marketing Lead

Stakeholders: Chief Marketing Officer & Senior Director of Corporate Marketing and Brand

Ad Run & Goals

Ad Placement

  • Semafor: News outlet founded by Justin B Smith (Bloomberg) andBen 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%