BRAND MANAGEMENT: ADCOLONY
Sudden Change: AdColony 2.0
After contributing to the acquisition of Yvolver by Opera Mediaworks, the team of 12 Yvolver employees were placed under the AdColony umbrella, itself acquired by Opera Software/Mediaworks a year prior. During this time I contributed research and strategy with Opera in Norway around the sale of Opera in its entirety to a Chinese conglomerate entity. This full sale fell through, with the Opera Mediaworks business remaining, and resulted in the loss of the Opera branding and the need to develop a new brand to operate Opera Mediaworks under.
As part of the marketing team, I helped put together client panels on ideas, scope an RFP for a rebrand agency, and audit all of the various social and web presences under the Opera Mediaworks umbrella (which was actually just 12 different acquisitions with 1 CEO!). With our SVP of Marketing and the other members of the team, we presented a simple solution that would enable the entity to comply with the need to drop Opera branding within 3 months: Take the AdColony brand, modernize the 2011 look and feel, and literally elevate it within the company, becoming the single company everyone would operate as.
An Efficiency Pivot: AdColony 2.5
As I was promoted to lead AdColony’s marketing and PR entirely on a global level, one struggle came up in my conversations with leadership of commercial and product teams: The brand unveiled in 2016, while pretty, was hard to work with from a design perspective. I rallied my designer, our award-winning internal creative team, and our head of strategy to develop a cleaner, more flexible brand that could support a smaller, leaner marketing team and more self-sufficient teams throughout the company.
The simplification maintained the overall look and feel. High-quality photgraphy that spoke to AdColony’s audience strengths were carried through, but Wwhisps became solid donuts and circles with solid colours (and a couple of slight gradients) that represented our specific audiences with some extra flexibility added.
AdColony 2.5 was a massive hit, and enabled AdColony to go from a company with 40% layoff in mid-2017 to one leading the mobile ad industry. AdColony became the only SDK-based ad network that successfully courter brand and agency demand thanks to our strong branding, and thoughtful content with it.
You can check out some of the other executions of the AdColony 2.5 branding below. You can also find the full brand guideline PDF available here.
