You Got It

January 28th hit the company when we didn't have a creative team dedicated to social. With much of the group stuck on our brand design systems or building educational content, we needed thought and design leadership to help develop social content/strategy.

Moving quickly, I took a few days to sit in some customer feedback sessions with the research team and developed a very high-level strategy for social. The upper left image on the grid below shows the social pillars I crafted, which became the foundation for the social crisis strategy.

After activating the team on some educational content, the c-team quickly wanted creative ideas to combat the negative chatter from a group they called "The Fringe Fighters." (people who were on the fringe/cusp of leaving Robinhood). That night, I created storyboards to present ideas to help combat the negative social media discussion. CS + team responded favorably to these ideas and asked us to align one of them with the pillars above.

"You Got It" fit the bill. It highlighted some of our product features and added a level of transparency on things we are building for the future. This concept also performed the best in our research/testing. Working with our agency partner, we produced the video and planned to target a specific audience with the cut.

Learnings: Looking back, I would have tested these concepts without music. I think the team got excited about using a song like "You Got It," but the reality of that was slim. In turn, when we had to change the music due to budget constraints, it felt like the project lost a bit of steam.

I am reluctant to say this because I love data, but I wish we focused less on testing these concepts. Not because I don't think the research was valuable, but testing lost us quite a few weeks. The original ask was to have this turned around quickly, so it felt like a blocker that we would start testing ads now (when we have never tested ads in the past.)

I also would have liked to work with agency partners who could execute faster. Our AOR took more than four weeks to produce this short video, and at the end of it all, we still needed to have an internal team member clean it up. With how much lifting the storyboard did, it should have been as simple as handing that off to an editor and having them make the cuts.

Though there were quite a few hiccups, I feel I learned a lot from that experience and loved seeing farfetched concepts come to life.