Sky - oldie but goldie (2015/16)
My role
At my agency I was the lead designer for the Sky account and worked across the business in creative advertising for Sky sports, movies, broadband and bundle packages.
I loved working for Sky with the warm and friendly team. I would have joined Sky if there was not a clause in my agency contract that forbidden me.
I designed websites with a world class user experience, banner ads, video content, and created Sky Academy which has nicely evolved to Sky Up Academy Studios. I have found a few examples of old work – please bare in mind this is from 2015/16 so it’s looking tired and visually keeping up with trends there is a lot I would change.
Below I will showcase 4 different areas of work:
1) Sky Academy – the initial idea and how it’s evolved in 2023
2) Sky Awesome Foursome – campaign
3) Sky Movies – Ad website take overs and general advertising
4) Sky Friends and Family
5) Sky Sports – retouching and advertising
Highlights
- Created Sky Up Academy Studios
- 100's of advertising campaigns
- Content Creation with celebrities
- Won every Sky pitch
- Working across Sports, Broadband, Movies, Bundles, Friends and Family
1) Sky Academy
Sky came to us with a simple brief; how do we get young people participating in activities, learn and find work afterwards. We pitched an idea to Sky and won against 4 other agencies!
The basic principle was anyone could create a project in their local area, enlist others to help out on the project and earn certificate badges. The more volunteering you did, the more badges you got – bragging rights to share on social media and fast access to jobs at Sky.
I designed a responsive website that harnessed the project idea which won the pitch. The pitch came with a million pound budget plus celebrities such as David Beckham and Jessica Ennis were sponsored by Sky so we could use them how we saw fit.
Evolution of the idea
The idea later evolved into incorporating a Sky Studios experience for schools, and this is how www.skyup.sky/academy-studios came into existence.
Pitching a refined idea, Sky settled for a sneak peak of what it’s like to work in a Sky studio. Schools could come to the Sky campus and role play as producers, sounds engineers, camera operators, presenters and directors. They could make their own mini production to share and be proud of, as well as learning teamwork skills along the way.
Continuing to support Sky in this joint venture, I designed multiple assets for them: A new website that is still live today, video content and social media assets.
All content ideas for social media were sketched and presented before the final effort of production started. I carried out all the idea generation, photography and final visual designs, including the narrative of post copy.
In after effects I rotoscope these videos that appear on social media giving a 3D effect of the person popping outside of the page. Ella Eyre was used as the main promotion as she was pushing her new single.
2) Sky Awesome Foursome - campaign
Individually great, together unbeatable – that was the campaign slogan for Sky’s best selling bundle package. I designed the master campaign assets and gave it a super hero feel due to the blockbuster films coming out that summer. The interactive homepage takeover allowed users to explore and purchase bundle combinations. These below images are screenshots from the msn website.
3) Sky Movies - website take overs and general advertising
While working on the Sky account I created over 1000 rich media banner adverts coving Movies, bundles and Sports. Here are a few storyboards showing the final designs.
Sky Movies banner advert
Sky movies shop - interactive banner take over
Taking over the shop front of Sky is a major undertaking especially with the likes of Netflix as the main competition. I created a super slick takeover banner where customers could carousel though film titles, watch trailers and purchase the movies bundle onto their subscription package. Conversion rate click throughs to purchase were 37% – the highest Sky has ever had from one banner campaign.
4) Sky Friends and Family, 2013.
Friends and Family of Sky employees get some brilliant perks. I was leading the design of the F&F campaign websites and accompany advertisment online and offline posters.
The Friends and Family campaign would switch the look and feel depending on the movies out that month, customer type and analytical insights.
5) Sky Sports - retouching and advertising
In the glass era of the Sky logo, I create a glass effect Sky Sports logo to tease our account manager with. She loved it and we were commissioned to create this global brand assets for Sky. Below are example usages of the glossy glass logo. For video this was taken a step further by using the Ken Burns motion effect that turns still images into super slow motion. This Ken Burns motion effect is still in use today in 2023 as seen in the latest golf masters adverts.
A small example of dynamic banner adverts for the Cricket.
A small example of myt video Sky Sports football banners from a very long time ago.
When Sky won the F1 contract I designed (and built in Celtra) all the banner adverts across the European markets. This was over 300 different types of banners and sizes – what you see below is a small sample of the 728×90 versions.
