Global Partners - Integrated Marketing Campaign

Overview

  • Client: The Motley Fool’s Global Partners Service

  • Role: Creative Director (concept, strategy, and execution oversight)

  • Deliverables: Launch video, landing page graphics, fulfillment images, direct mailer

The Challenge

The goal was to attract new customers to international investing, a strategy many prospects perceived as intimidating and overly complex. The challenge was to make the case for global investing feel accessible, credible, and exciting, while avoiding overwhelming audiences with dense financial information.

An example of previous marketing campaign graphics. Slides were both overly simple stylistically and yet overwhelming in information presentation. For this launch we needed something sleeker and better at conveying info.

Creative Strategy

  • The Big Idea: A journalistic approach covering past wins in the service.

  • The campaign positioned international investing as a global adventure. We adopted a journalistic, documentary-style approach, showcasing past wins and untapped opportunities overseas. By leaning into storytelling and authenticity, the campaign reframed international investing as familiar, tangible, and rewarding, not risky or distant.

Execution

  • Global Film Production: Directed a 3-week shoot across 8 countries, capturing interviews, on-site footage, and international business stories.

  • Visual Identity: Designed a pastel, map-inspired palette with motion-driven graphics, evoking a sense of travel and discovery.

  • Modularity: Built video segments that could be repurposed for fulfillment and subscriber content, maximizing ROI.

  • Direct Mailer: Created a complementary print piece with map-inspired design elements that balanced copy density with visual recall of the video’s look and feel.

Graphics for this campaign always featured dynamic background movement and light leaks so that less information could be presented on screen at a time without feeling static. This allows for more discreet chunks of information to be conveyed without overwhelming the audience.

A small snippet from the launch video. Previous campaigns often featured a host on a panel with an analyst. In order to convey the depth of research and the hands-on approach of the service, I opted to have the Lead Advisor host the video in a “Parts Unknown” travelogue style.

Direct Mailer

In the process of getting the video across the finish line I also began work on a direct mailer to accompany the launch. Because the final deliverable on this was print, I didn’t want to rely too heavily on the video’s visual language. Without motion many of the strengths of the video would become weaknesses on the printed page. Thus I took a hybrid approach, incorporating some subtle grid lines on graphics to recall the map style graphics of the video without taking away from the copy-heavy content of the mailer.

Results

  • $4.1M revenue on a $100K budget.

  • 60% lift in conversions from direct mailer.

  • Campaign content repurposed across marketing, product, and editorial teams.

My Impact

  • Directed International Production: Managed creative and logistics across 8 countries.

  • Redefined Visual Standards: Elevated the service’s design language, setting a new creative benchmark.

  • Maximized ROI: Transformed a single marketing project into a multi-use content system spanning Marketing, Product, and Editorial