LinkedIn – Real Face of Sales

Campaign: ad campaign, art direction, design (all print & digital assets)

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images (from top left): 1 & 2: OOH ads, San Francisco. 3: Bespoke landing pages for the campaign. 4: One of the (many) animated social ads. 5: Animated digital bus shelter ad. 6: Interior of LinkedIn’s head office in San Francisco. 7: Interior lift, LinkedIn head office. 8: One of the full-page print ads to support the campaign.

After the success of their first major OOH ad campaign, ‘Get Closer’, LinkedIn came to us with a new challenge: to drive positive brand perception amongst sales individuals in the US and UK through a brand new campaign. The aim was to show that LinkedIn champions real sales professionals and understands their role in the modern sales world.

In order to help change the perception of ‘sales people’, we wanted to create a whole new image library of sales professionals and release this to stock library sites. We created a hero video following the lives of our salespeople, contrasting the clichéd image of sales with the real face of modern sales. We then conducted a series of photoshoots of these people in and around their workplace.

We released these images to stock libraries and watched as they were downloaded and used around the world. Both the video and images were promoted through a paid media campaign, driving traffic back to a dedicated hub on LinkedIn.

I helped to art-direct the photoshoot, select and retouch the final images, and then designed all the related assets, including: landing page designs, animated social posts, and ads across large OOH, digital bus shelter, magazine, and online display.

You can see some of these above and some of the digital display ads I created here: Set 1 | Set 2 | Set 3. I also designed a series of large window displays that LinkedIn featured across their major US offices to promote the campaign.

The design process was complicated by the fact that LinkedIn had recently rolled out a major rebrand, completely changing its look. These ads were some of the first to establish this brand across its wide-reaching campaign.

The images themselves have already been viewed over 42 million times and have had more than 192,000 downloads combined! It can be fun to use Google reverse image search and find them in use everywhere, on everything from sales blogs to branded websites and social feeds.