Setting the wheels in motion on new channels

At TotallyMoney, we're on a mission to help everyone move their finances forward.

With a live credit report and score we're putting customers in control of their own data, for free. We help them understand complex financial information, and provide them with the tools they need to improve their eligibility and find their best borrowing options.

Here’s how we're using motion to help communicate our message better. 

Our marketing team is always on the lookout to test new channels — the latest of which were TikTok and YouTube. 

When launching new creatives, it's essential to understand the channel it will be used in. We aim to create ads that work in the context of where they are placed, but also stand out, to grab the audience's attention. 

To kick start things I gathered all of the material I needed from Alex, one of our marketing managers. This information included everything from video formats, sizing, length, how and where they would appear, and details of the tests. Those details included what we wanted to learn from them, and how we’d use those learnings to fuel the next round of design.

This helped me get started with layout mockups which would fit the brief, and also create a demonstration of what they would look like in real life. Some important considerations were the different design ratios. We usually work with square or portrait adverts, so this being landscape brought new avenues for us to explore. 

Through live testing, we have found set lengths of time that perform best for individual channels. With Facebook, for example, keeping the ad to 5 seconds performs better with our audience than longer ones. 

As YouTube is a new channel for us, we decided to go with the lengths that they recommended. So we started with 15 seconds — close to their minimum of 12 seconds, but much longer than our regular motion ads.

As these would be longer than our regular ads, I needed to create a short storyline, to deliver the message to the audience. The idea for this brief was to stick to themes we’ve used before, which we know have performed well. With that in mind, I decided to explore wording around ‘eligibility’ and ‘find the right card’.

I used Figma first, to set up some simple storyboard options exploring the set themes with stand in cards. I then took several into After Effects, to better hone the storyline through motion. As with many creative tasks, you won’t know if it works until you put it into practice, and this applies to motion as much as it does to other areas of design. 

I tested out multiple storyboard ideas in motion, to see which actually worked well in that format. Some were good ideas on paper, but it was hard to get the motion to work in the way I initially intended, so they were scrapped. 

Our creative team is great at bouncing ideas and reviewing work, so I got some good feedback on the options from the team. This led me towards using more of the space in the ad, not featuring one card over all others, and sticking with illustration to highlight eligibility.

At TotallyMoney one of our values is ‘Build. Measure. Learn’, which we use often in marketing. For the final set of ads, we decided to test background colour and soundtrack, to see which type performed best with actual customers. You can see a snapshot of the end scene of the final advertisement here. 

When they go live, we will see which type performs best. We hope this will help us when developing new ads for this channel!