BIG BOOKS OF DATA
In response to the need for a large omnibus-style report, I ideated and led AdColony’s “big book of data” strategy. Leading the internal content team, contractor, and designer to deliver award-winning annual reports.
In 2020, we partnered with DISQO for data on "The Modern Mobile Gamer," expanding in 2021 and 2022 with GlobalWebIndex to explore app usage, preferences, consumer journeys, and more.
Taking four to five months from ideation to publication, these projects were highly rewarding and exemplified my leadership. I'm proud of my team's writing, design work, and the subsequent PR campaigns that raised awareness over three months.
The 2021 edition became AdColony's most downloaded content ever, with over 2,000 downloads and Digital Turbine's top content, garnering 300 downloads in six months.
Click the + on the items below for more detail on each execution.
2020 - THE MODERN MOBILE GAMER
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Germinating from the popularity of AdColony’s infographics from my EMEA team on the “persona” of mobile gamers in Europe, my team and I embarked on an “omnibus” survey we could point to for data.
I sought out and negotiated a data partnership with DISQO to provide validity to the data, and they contributed knowledge to survey design.
The report was the first of its kind in the industry and led to a great opportunity for sales teams to reach out during COVID quarantine and say “Did you see this?” and kick of fruitful sales calls. Almost immediately, press outlets, sales teams, even Otello Corp (AdColony’s parent holding company) shareholders asked when the next installment was coming.
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Originally designed as a “print out coffee table” book that we could send to brands & agencies, COVID put a stop to that plan. The wider format leant itself to having elements pulled into various presentations sales teams gave, and really became a flexible tool for the company during a difficult time.
Click here to view the report itself.
(Due to file size, the page is hosted via my personal Google Drive)
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Ceros was a tool I championed at AdColony, and later Digital Turbine. Its no-code layout work enables interactive, in-depth experiences with no HTML experience, which came in handy with our designers being more traditional.
Project managing the experience together with our designer gave me direct control and feedback on a better, more landing-page-friendly format for some of the report highlights, with the CTA still leading to the eBook download page. (Now non-functional)
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My boss at the time, SVP of Strategy & Business Developer Matt Barash, took the results of the report live with Adweek on October 21st, 2020. The event attracted over 1500 attendees and we even wrote up full Q&A later for the questions we could and couldn’t get to.
Check out the Q&A (in PDF form) here.
View the webinar here.
2021 - THE LIFE OF THE MOBILE GAMER
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For 2021, we moved our data partnership to Global Web Index (GWI) whose broader base of data enabled us to slice and dice our custom questions with their core responses. This enabled us to get much more granular on behaviour and deliver both an improved sophomore effort in 2021, but also dive into things later in response to RFPs to help the sales team close sales.
How do mobile gamers index against people shopping for a washing machine in the next six months? The data gathered for this report enabled us to answer those questions and more.
The report itself takes the picture from 2020 of “who” and looks at the “how” behaviours of mobile gamers, how they shop, how they play, how they view health and fitness, and so on.
This was AdColony’s single most downloaded piece of content ever, with over 2,000 downloads, and became Digital Turbine’s most downloaded content when moved over, with over 300 downloads in six months.
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The design for our 2021 edition involved me managing more design input from our new parent (as of February 2021, when the project started) of Digital Turbine. While the marketing teams outside of leadership hadn’t integrated, I asked for a more refined design look that felt more universal and less “AdColony-ish” than the 2020 version.
You can view the full ebook here.
(Due to file size, the page is hosted via my personal Google Drive)
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Like 2020, I worked with our designers to develop a “highlights” Ceros page to act as landing page for social media posts and newsletters to give people a taste of the insights within, leading to report downloads.
Due to COVID, we transitioned to working with Ceros’ in-house creative team to finish the project. Managing external contractors and vendors is a skill I’m proud of, and being consistently asked by the creatives when we’ll get to work together again is a huge compliment.
The end product was so great, Ceros gave it their Inspired Content Award for Best 2022 Ebook.
2022 - THE MOBILE APP HABIT REPORT
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With Digital Turbine’s focus on apps in general instead of AdColony’s focus on mobile gaming, I approached the strategy of the 2022 version a little differently. 2020 was the “who,” 2021 was the “how,” 2022 would be the “why” app users do what they do.
In addition, the audience differed slightly also: instead of being directed at brands and agencies wanting to reach users in mobile games, it would speak to any app developer, including restaurant apps, games, and advertisers seeking to reach users in those apps. This pivot to support a different overall business model was very successful.
One chapter I took on myself was looking at the exit point for users - why they uninstall, combined with privacy and trust behaviors with mobile apps. This aspect of the mobile app user journey is one not explored often, and I enjoyed diving into it.
I worked closely with more writers than ever before, and with GWI on iterative questions that could be more insightful in the long run. I also worked with multiple designers instead of just one, delivering a report that embraced the new Digital Turbine brand, a major project I led in 2022.
Like previous versions, it launched in the Fall and is one of Digital Turbine’s most downloaded content pieces, just behind the 2021 version.
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Designed to be printed and folded, the cleaner, but more text-heavy design of this version of the ebook was intentional, giving more weight to the graphs where necessary.
As the first piece of research released with the new DT brand, it was important it make a splash, and the use of the squircles and colour palette really helped it stand out at a time when several competitors were also launching reports.
Unlike previous reports, I took the liberty of actually adding some best practices to address the uninstall and Apple AppTrackingTransparency prompts, which were well received by mobile app developers.
You can view the full ebook here.
(Due to file size, the page is hosted via my personal Google Drive)
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With the digital marketing team now reporting to me, I leveraged their talents, and the newly created design request process (built by my marketing ops guru) to create a selection of just a few variant social images we could use to highlight different parts of the report for different audiences.
These were a hit with both PocketGamer, who picked up the report, and internal social shares through out employee advocacy platform. They also performed well on first-party social as well.