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Photo: Celine Grouard for Fast Company

Case Study

Fast Company
Innovation Festival

Multi-platform marketing for New York’s biggest innovation event of the year

The Challenge

Fast Company’s annual Innovation Festival convenes thousands of makers and innovators from around the globe for engaging workshops, fast tracks, and panels. To build anticipation and grow attendance, we worked with the Consumer Marketing team to deploy the existing festival brand across web, social, and print platforms in a comprehensive marketing campaign.

Our Solutions

Credits

Emails
Print Ads
Landing Page
Web & Social Ads
Animation

Credits

Art Direction:
Mike Schnaidt, Creative Director; Design and Photo teams, Fast Company

Marketing:
Consumer Marketing, Fast Company

Strategy

Bouncing Back

Following the challenges to in-person events post-Covid, our goal was to help the festival re-establish its place as the most vibrant innovation event in the city. We balanced the flexibility of the existing brand system with consistency to create a clear campaign across inboxes, between magazine pages, and on a daily Manhattan commute.

Solutions

Display Ads

The festival branding was built to be modular, making each ad size a puzzle piece of graphic elements to rearrange without losing clarity or consistency for the brand. 

Social Ads

For the image-forward world of social media, we took advantage of greater opportunity to get creative. Social ads played up large branding imagery, speaker collages, and photo-based event features.

Photo: Pearl Media

Photo: Pearl Media

Photo: Pearl Media

Photo: Pearl Media

On-Location Ads

For the month leading up to the festival, we created ads to run at the venue itself, Brookfield Place — a major thoroughfare connected to the World Trade Center Station.

Brand in Motion

To showcase speakers and communicate the dynamism of the festival, we built off of the festival’s existing logo animation to create a series of animated social ads.

Email Campaign

To keep the marketing team nimble, we designed a custom master template to mix and match email sections in new combinations on the fly. This provided the efficiency the marketing team required to quickly tailor email efforts for fast turnarounds.

Print Advertising

To reach Fast Company magazine readers, we designed a series of print ads with a subscriber-exclusive deal on tickets. Ads emphasized the festival’s dynamic sessions and wide range of big-name speakers.

Sticking the Landing

All marketing collateral pointed to a landing page to showcase speakers, promote special sessions, and sell tickets — clear, compact, and most importantly, on‑brand.

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