Michael Meyer

As Creative Director, I had the pleasure of leading the creation of an interactive, cross functional online brand book for Eventbrite, which offered creator-obsessed guidance and POV on every aspect of brand expression, from blog content, social media, and email campaigns, to UX design, corporate communications, and events.

Started as a self service platform for event creators, Eventbrite had grown to include music venues, festivals, conferences, and tour companies along with a wild mix of classes, workshops, and other live experiences. While the product was clean and functional, the brand was sterile, bland, and transactional in its look, feel, and voice.

Mantras like “Create an experience” and “Made for those who do” served to inspire employees to help event creators think bigger and do more with their events and to take every opportunity to create uniquely valuable customer experiences in everything from email campaigns and blog content to industry conferences and onsite services.

With a solid brand platform, I led a global, distributed team of designers, writers, and strategists in the creation and execution of campaigns for brand awareness, customer acquisition, and product marketing that drove unprecedented engagement and results by connecting with creators in deeply personal, empathetic and empowering ways.

And then Covid happened, and the events industry was decimated. Millions of event creators all over the world saw their passions and livelihoods vanish from the near future, and Eventbrite laid off 45% of its staff, including me. I’m sad for all of the creators affected and for my former team, but I’m incredibly proud of the brand and the experiences we were able to create together

Epsilon Theory is the subversive, cult-followed brainchild of Ben Hunt, a Harvard PhD and former hedge fund manager who writes and podcasts about macroeconomics and politics through the lenses of game theory, history, and popular culture.

Working with an art director, I created the Epsilon Theory brand and TOV, launched a website and directed podcasts and events aimed at change-makers in the financial world along with a series of devastatingly differentiated paid social media campaigns.

See below for a more intensive case study of my work, or open the url to hear it from my client, DeviantArt CEO Angelo Sotira.

http://spyed.deviantart.com/journal/Boldly-Facing-The-Future-498282387

DeviantArt is on of my favorite projects to date because it necessitated the full range of my skills as a writer, creative strategist and business consultant. It serves as an excellent example of how a brand can galvanize a community, attract new customers and lead the transformation of its business.

One of the largest social media sites in the world with 32 million active registered members, DeviantArt was nonetheless suffering from an insular culture and a dated visual identity. We defined the problem early on as "the walled garden"—a cluttered, confusing amalgamation of years of added features and functionality that made for a massive barrier to entry for new users.

Through extensive workshops and interviews with stakeholders and community members, I gained an intimate understanding of the brand from within. This enabled me to write a brand story and personality traits that articulated DeviantArt's purpose in the world, its role in the lives of artists and viewers of art, and set the stage for its evolution. The core of the story expressed the brand's essential purpose - to nurture creativity in young and established artists and explode their art into the world - Bleed and Breed Art.

The story also acts as a guide for business decisions, including partner choices and the development of their first mobile app. The questions, "does this bleed and breed art?" was asked throughout the process of defining functionality and the UI to ensure an frictionless experience that would appeal to current members and, most importantly, attract new demographics of users for the first time in years.

This project involved strategy, repositioning and making an authentic connection between technology and people—specifically, families. The app allows family members to quickly communicate, track each other and call for help if needed.

Originally conceived as a means to connect families via multiple channels of communication (wifi, cell, radio, landlines) after natural disasters following Hurricane Katrina, the app was viewed as a worst-case scenario mobile panic button instead of the everyday family management tool that the company aspired to be. The popularity of tertiary feature allowing users to view registered sex offenders in their neighborhoods added to the for-emergencies-only perception of the brand.

Through interviews and workshops, I determined that that the security story was actually a story of personal freedom. Unlike other security services which are about locking things down, Life360 allows families to go about their own active, geographically distributed lives while still maintaining the closeness and the comfort of being home and able to check on each other at a glance.

I defined their internal core story as Family Intelligence - a category of technology that provides the ability to instantly know that your family is safe and see where they are - and created an external tagline to express that benefit—The New Family Circle.

This was a fun one. I love Batman and was thrilled to be asked to come up with a campaign concept for DC's Multiverse offer, which is essentially a choose-you-own-adventure style of comic for Madefire motion books.

It was important to me that the multiverse offer felt rooted in the Batman universe, so I scoured the internet looking for inspiration from decades of Batman comics, TV shows and movies until I came across the perfect line from from a scene where Alfred is trying to help Bruce Wayne avoid losing himself in the choices he was making as Batman:

We are the choices we make.

It's as true for any of us as it was for Bruce Wayne, and it served to further immerse the reader into the experience of being Batman.

Challenged by Fast Company to undergo a hypothetical rebrand of Hillary Clinton's campaign following the launch of her logo, we quickly got to work creating an identity based on Mrs. Clinton's aspiration to be seen as a pragmatic problem-solver rather than another politician towing their party's line.

The result was a decidedly apolitical core story, Make it real. The idea was to get above the fray of partisan politics, find real solutions to real problems affecting everyone and then actually solving them. On a deeper and more personal level for Mrs. Clinton's supporters, Make it real serves as a call to action to ensure that the perceived inevitability of her candidacy was realized.

Make it real also allowed for our designers to create a system that focused on people, problems and solutions rather than the candidate herself and negated the need to have a static logo. This avoided any side-by-side comparisons to her existing logo and served to differentiate her campaign from the traditional look and feel of previous political campaigns.

IfOnly came to us in the early stages of its development with the aspiration to be a place where people could buy celebrity experiences and simultaneously benefit charitable organizations. 

The story I created bridged the gap between the expensive and exclusive taste of the company's target audience and the childlike wonder that we all have for heroes and luminaries. The story, The Life Wonder-full did just that, connecting impossible-to-shop-for people living wonderful lives to their desire to live lives filled with wonder.

Conceived as a blue collar alternative to Uber and an attempt to save the taxi industry, Flywheel (formerly Cabulous!) was suffering from a cartoonish identity and a lack of credibility. 

Combining a business model based on signing up entire fleets of taxis (as opposed to individual drivers) with the mindset of its cosmopolitan customer base, I created the story, City-driven.

The story drove an identity that strives to communicate to people living busy, urban lives and need to get where they are going—driven, city-people that just need a cab and a driver that knows their city inside and out.