Qlik – Welcome Home

Campaign: concept, art direction, design

click any image above to view in full

images (from top left): 1: Campaign landing page. 2: Animated (HTML5) display ads. 3 & 4: Animated social ads.

Qlik are an international data and analytics company and some of their products compete with big names such as Microsoft’s ‘Power BI’. They wanted a new long-term campaign to highlight their of customers who had tried competing products – only to return to Qlik realising it was the better solution. Whilst we explored several visual approaches, the one that really struck with them was a simply called ‘Welcome home’ and showed a celebratory image showing balloons tumbling out of a doorway.

We helped them collect data and user stories from returning subscribers by creating a year long campaign that encompassed trade, display advertising and social – these all led through to a bespoke landing page created to tell the story, but also to encourage users to tell them why they returned. This feedback was then used to tell more user stories and formed phase 2 of the campaign.

To achieve the right look, I worked with an external agency to create this in 3D (ensuring the balloons were all in Qlik brand colours). This master animation was created with as much flexibility as possible so it could be used across a wide range of assets – across social, print, packaging, web and digital advertising.

The campaign ran initially across the whole of EMEA, with multiple assets created in 5 different languages. I created all the master assets and supervised the roll-out and translations. In order to keep the creative fresh over time, we also created a second master animation – with the same core idea, but an updated look.

Welcome Home – phase 1

Welcome Home – phase 2

As part of the campaign I created a range of display ads (across four different languages). A key challenge here was a way to replicate the animated balloons from the master animation, but remain within the very tight constraints of HTML5 display ad limits. I created a coded ‘particle effect’ that animates the balloons procedurally. This was then easily repurposed across all ad sizes and translations – and because it’s coded, it has the added benefit of being different every time it’s viewed.

You can view the ads here: HTML5 Display ads