Visual storytelling is at the heart of every successful holiday campaign, especially for brands like Moment, which cater to photographers and videographers.
In their latest holiday campaign, Moment partnered with Stills to bring their creative vision to life. This collaboration not only streamlined the licensing process across multiple touchpoints but also helped Moment craft a cohesive and inspiring narrative that resonated with their audience.
We spoke with Alec Ploof, Head of Growth at Moment, about how Moment leveraged Stills’ imagery to elevate their holiday campaign and connect with their community of creatives.
STILLS: As a brand that specializes in gear for photography and videography, visuals are obviously a big deal. Can you share why choosing the right imagery is so important for Moment?
The Moment team is comprised of creatives ourselves, but we’ve also been incredibly fortunate to work with some of the most talented photographers in the world.
So, when it comes time for our big holiday campaign at the end of every year, picking the right imagery is important not only for our own creative spirits but also for setting the right tone when we invite everyone back to shop with us for themselves or their loved ones.
So when it came to finding images to feature, Stills’ collection was an easy choice. We’ve always been big fans of how Stills has curated the perfect list of photographers and styles to align for any brand, but especially our focus on going more places and capturing more Moments.
Going with Stills made the licensing across all our touchpoints — web, social, email, and ads — very easy.
Can you share a bit about your creative team and how they collaborate to bring campaigns like this to life?
While we reach millions of creatives, our internal marketing team is actually fewer than 10.
This year we rounded up the products in our store to fit some themes of places you could go with the gear and needed imagery to fit that. That’s where Stills and our designers came in.
In less than an hour, we had a whole board of images that fit all the places we wanted to go. We were than able to start building around the assets immediately.
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How do you generate ideas that differentiate your holiday campaign from competitors?
Being creators ourselves has always helped the Moment team stand out from the competition. We collaborate and make stuff just as if we were any other creator with a Shopify store would and I think that goes far.
When it comes to actual brainstorming techniques, mashups have always been our go-to method for generating fresh ideas. We’ll take two random items, brands, or places and mash them together to create something new.
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This year, we did mashups across all of our gift guides. That helped us land on more curated and unique creatives such as “New Zealand Trail Photography” or “Filming in Norway.”
For your holiday campaign, you used Stills imagery across web, social, email, and ads. What made you choose Stills for such a key moment in your marketing?
Beyond having the best curation of photographers out there, Stills was an easy choice. It made the licensing across all our touchpoints (web, social, email, ads) very easy.
We’ve always been a big fan of how Stills has curated the perfect list of photographers and styles to align for any brand, but especially our focus on going more places and capturing more Moments.
How did you choose the specific images for your holiday campaign? What was your process for narrowing it down?
We started on Stills by searching for keywords related to our campaign. We searched for things like road trips, airplanes, and film photography.
We quickly found artists whose work we loved and browsed their images until we found the ones we needed.
For this campaign, we knew we’d need about 25 images across all our touchpoints, and that ended up being more than plenty.
Did you notice any changes in performance or engagement when you used Stills images compared to other visuals?
Thanks to Stills, our gift guide landing page looked and performed better than ever for our big holiday campaign. We really wanted to give our customers the best-looking online store they could browse, and we felt that Stills was able to help us provide that.
Having the right images made the site feel coherent. It got more customers into our gift guides/sale collections than ever before. Over 10,000 events/actions were recorded across all our gift guide pages, which is up about 20% year over year.
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Looking back, if you hadn’t used Stills for your holiday campaign, what do you think might have been missing?
This year, we had quite a few new product releases before the holiday that kept us really busy. So if we hadn’t used Stills, it’s very likely our internal team would only have had the time to get us 1/10th of what we got from Stills — for potentially more of a cost.
