Google I/O 2023:
The Situation:
In November of 2022, Google Developer Studios was tasked with production and asset generation for the upcoming Google I/O conference. Along with 3 dozen videos being produced, an ambitious social media campaign would be targeted for release as part of a live stream. A design team would be tasked utilizing that year’s I/O branding guidelines to achieve this objective.
The Task:
In previous years this project required a team of designers to be on standby during the event to produce content, often dedicating several days for the marketing and social media teams’ requests for content delivered to the Google for Developers (GfD) media channels. GDS had noted that this caused later production pipeline issues with other deliverables and thus I was assigned with creating a workflow to resolve this issue.
The Project:
I opted to modify, edit, and rebuild the “sticker” assets provided by the Google I/O brand team to create a suite of templates based on the guidelines outlined for I/O ‘23. I was able to expand upon the social post assets and contribute a suite of event backgrounds, 16:9 social design patterns, YouTube thumbnail packs for each announcement category, all with the goal of deliverables to the marketing teams’ Canva account to make it easier for their social media team to post updates the precise minute they are announced.
I began the project in early February of 2023, having finished over 75+ assets it within the month to permit time for a detailed QA session with the social team to ensure that there were no gaps in the types of social posts they were anticipating for I/O.
By the time I/O occurred that May, we had provided every promotional team a fully adaptable setup, empowering them to new levels of creative promotional solutions.
I also set up a chatroom “hotline” with request forms for specific asset types as the needs occured, to give the marketing team the maximum amount of options to pivot to any opportunities that should arise during the talks.
Thumbnails
It was also essential to develop templates for the 40+ workshop videos that would be posted for developers as announcements were made. This included working carefully with the Google Developer Advocates to ensure a color coded system based on topic, and with the web team to ensure that the design of the thumbnails would carefully match the I/O landing page.
Blog posts, extended coverage
The subsequent months leading up to and post event would require an entire schedule of blog posts, dev workshops, and other live streams. I was able to utilize the brand system’s colorways to create a range of banners that could be easily added to posts, all with having minimal impact on the workflow of other Google brands post conference, as resolving this “long tail” of design requests was a key request from GDS stakeholders.
Results:
Live stream engagement skyrocketed cross-site nearly 28%, all the while behind the scenes the teams were working seamlessly, without friction, to provide a steady flow of artistic flair to the exciting developments for Google.
By anticipating the needs of the marketing team we were able to account for nearly 85% of their requests without needing to develop new assets. This meant additional time to produce specialized creative content that could drive further engagement.
The following other goals were achieved through this project:
Marketing asset pipeline: During I/O 2023, emergency requests from previous years plummeted by over 72%. This resulted in no longer needing a bespoke design team for day-of operations that often pulled resources from other brand projects.
Expanded adaptability: Design could better coordinate with social media teams to jump on organic engagement opportunities, instead of being on the backfoot with the deluge of requests.
Improved social media satisfaction: This caused a significantly smoother operation across multiple teams, as leadership team noted a stark contrast in the morale of the teams during the typically intense turnaround schedules.
