One of the joys of working in content is the ability to harness all areas of creative – video, editorial, design, motion graphics and illustration.
Add that to my love of formulating and executing a feature series – and you can see why ‘Icons’ is so close to my heart.
‘Icons’ celebrated some of Aston Villa’s biggest Holte End heroes with a week’s worth of gripping content for each player across all platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
With this campaign, my aim was to tell the story across multiple channels to reach bigger audiences and deliver the right content to those channels.
This campaign was conceived to serve two purposes – it created content during each international break, when the domestic football world goes quiet, while I also used it to spearhead some positive PR.
Despite improvements, fans were still struggling to get past the fact that Aston Villa were in the Championship.
My ambition with ‘Icons’ was to remind supporters that success is cyclical. I wanted to showcase past heroes and remind fans that the good times weren’t that long ago and would be back soon.
The campaign also tapped into the new club moto ‘Pride, Passion, Purpose’ – all three would be activated throughout.
As well as short-form GIFs, pictures and illustrations, the series also included two macro pieces of long-form content – an emotional interview with the star name in question as well as ‘Heroes with Villans’.
This matched the former star with a current ace – for example Dion Dublin and Juan Pablo Angel did walk-and-talks with Tammy Abraham and Jack Grealish respectively while Stiliyan Petrov got together with John McGinn.
Here, I used ‘Icons’ to help fans associate current stars with past heroes to further enhance the positive PR focus.
But how did ‘Icons’ come about?
We aligned football with religion – fans see their football team as a holy institution, one they worship and a stadium has often been likened to a church, a place to worship.
From there, I worked alongside talented illustrator, Dave Flanagan, to conceive an identity after being fully briefed on the campaign.
Further expanding on the religious theme, together we conceived the ‘Icons’ title – echoing back to the sacred artworks most closely associated with the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and the Roman Catholic faiths as well as the ‘stained glass window’ look and feel that illuminated the campaign.
With the identity fully realised, the brand ‘look and feel’ was rolled out across all content types and I worked alongside the Brand Manager to create social media headers for Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as well as website article templates and video intro stings.
Check out a selection of features below, which I have showcased per category.
Illustration
Video – macro content
Video – micro content
Motion Graphics
Design
Paul Brown 