ADS _ PRINT
DROPBOX _ TEAMWORK FOR INDIVIDUALS
This full-page ad ran in Fast Company in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, it became clear that Dropbox was an invaluable asset in the new remote work landscape. I wrote a manifesto of sorts about how teams are not a single organism, but different people with different needs, challenges, and locations. Yet, Dropbox brings teams together across all of those differences because it works not only for the whole, but for the individual.
DROPBOX _ KEEP IT FLOWING
In late 2018, Dropbox published a “Keep It Flowing” series of ads in four fall and winter editions of the NYT Magazine: Education, Culture, Tech & Design, and Lives They Lived. The goal of the ads was to build awareness of the core brand promise to “unleash the world’s creative energy.” Each ad was conceptually inspired by the content of the NYT Magazine edition in which it was published, and paired a short, poetic phrase with striking imagery to create a provocative and aspirational set of messages about what Dropbox stands for.
As Associate Editorial Director on the Brand Studio team, I was in on the process from the get-go, co-writing the copy and concepting ideas, themes, and visual provocations.
Education, top left _ Culture, top right _ Tech & Design, lower left _ Lives They Lived, lower right
DROPBOX _ PROGRESS MADE
Dropbox ran a full-page ad in the New York Times on March 4, 2019. The intent was purely brand awareness, but the marketing team requested we try to find a way to communicate “humanity within technology.”
I worked with two designers on the Brand Studio team to come up with the ad. Early on, we decided we wanted to go in a more editorial direction with the ad, so copy was extremely important. We worked through several concepts and iterations, shown here:
One of my first ideas for the ad concept was to take a very tech-sounding piece of data—the fact that, in the beginning of 2019, Dropbox was home to one exabyte of data. That’s a nearly incomprehensible number: a 1 followed by 18 zeros, or 100,000x the text of all the books in the Library of Congress.
I thought it would be interesting to take this mind-boggling factoid and find a way to make it human.
We tried that in several different ways, but in the end we ditched the numbers altogether in favor of a more simple message: All different kinds of people use Dropbox in all different kinds of ways to do really amazing things.
I dug through a huge stack of case studies to find a few client stories that represented both the breadth of industries Dropbox supports, as well as genuinely interesting stories.
After boiling this all down to a few pithy sentences, we had our winning concept and sent the ad to print.
BABYCENTER _ EVERYTHING YOU NEED
BabyCenter.com is an incredible resource for parents of young children, especially brand new parents. I went on the photo shoot (in Ojai, CA) and wrote the copy for both of these print ads, working closely with the creative director and designer. The goal was to make new parents feel like the brand knew them, understood them, and was the trustworthy, knowledgeable, supportive resource they needed.
