Redefining a brand two decades in the making to attract & inspire new audiences for GoPro

Project Summary

In early 2023 GoPro initiated an internal call-to-action to strategists and creatives to begin ideating the next evolution of the GoPro brand.

To attract and inspire new and existing audiences, and help refresh consumers’ idea of what GoPro is and who for, GoPro Studio was tasked with developing an evergreen brand campaign that could work across global marketing channels.

Along with other creative leaders in Studio (the collection of internal creative teams at GoPro), I pitched campaign ideas, worked within a cross-functional team to develop those ideas into cross-channel marketing concepts, and brought those concepts to leadership for approval.

Once the campaign was signed off, it became my job as the Creative Director of Advertising to translate that concept into actionable direction for my team, overseeing the development of our full-funnel global advertising support of GoPro’s brand campaign across various ad platforms and creative mediums.

Services

Art Direction
Brand Strategy
Creative Direction
Campaign Development
Paid Advertising

My Role

Creative Director, Advertising

In Collab WIth

Brand, Media & Photography Teams
Studio Creative Leads
Performance Marketing
Studio Leadership
Company Leadership

^ 2024 Q1 Broad audience AWareness advertising video

Making Fun, More Fun

“GoPro makes fun more fun.”

That was the original creative brief prompt, and imho, it was the superior brand statement. It felt exciting, expansive, and purposeful.

Alas, as all creatives have experienced, that was not the final direction we moved in. But, fun did stick.

GoPro is the Official Camera of Fun

“The Sausage”

The path that led us to this campaign was a familiar one for internal creatives: a lot of pitching with varying degrees of strategy, cross-channel consideration, and depth. Video is a language many GoPro-ers were most comfortable, and most familiar with, and it was often the case that a campaign concept was pitched in the form of a video edit. And that is how OCoF (aka the Official Camera of Fun) came to be.

And while it gave us, in this instance, a very specific (and fun!) way to visualize and succinctly articulate “GoPro makes fun more fun”, it also created the unique challenge of needing to retroactively develop a strategy around what “the official camera of fun” meant to us as an organization, why and how that message should inspire audiences to align themselves to our brand and convert into customers, and how this campaign might evolve over time as the business continues to evolve.

^ 2023 Q2 Broad audience AWareness advertising video—The first ocof ad and pretty much the og pitch

Starting with Strategy

This brand campaign really lived across every team in Marketing, and each creative leader needed to figure out how to direct their team while staying in alignment with the work of all other teams in Studio.

For my team specifically, I wanted to establish some high-level direction early on to help us frame how OCoF showed up across our ad funnel, for varying audiences, and give us a framework for when and how we could adjust “the dials” of fun to suite those needs. →

Building an Evergreen Campaign, One Ad at a Time

The OCoF campaign was unique for us at GoPro because of the expressed commitment to continue investing, not just in brand awareness advertising, but this specific campaign. Our marketing was traditionally oriented around product releases, and those campaigns typically ran for a few months to a year.

Having the opportunity to continue investing time and dollars into this brand campaign gave us the chance to create more audience specific content, explore creative options with music, messaging and imagery, and invest in consumer insights and market testing.

^ 2023 Q3 Broad Audience Awareness advertising video

Fun For Different Audiences

In early 2024 we introduced a brand new audience into the mix, targeting teens. This was a really fun demographic to make content for, and although we were finding a lot of success with our ads, we only scratched the surface in terms of developing truly audience-led, contextually relevant content.

We also developed activity-specific brand ads that reached targeted audiences who showed an interest in various GoPro relevant activities, sometimes specific to regions, like travel, snow sports, and fishing.

^ 2024 Q2 Youth audience awareness Advertising video

^ 2024 Q4 Youth audience awareness Advertising video w/ tie in to our release of the new entry-level hero camera

^ 2024 Q4 Snow audience awareness Advertising video w/ tie in to our release of the new entry-level hero camera

A Footnote on Creative Performance

In 2024 we allocated 61% of the total paid ad budget to brand awareness initiatives, delivering a positive ROI of $1.25, effectively balancing performance-driven results with long-term brand growth.

We focused most of this spend on video-based advertising, largely at top of the ad funnel. This strategy was developed in partnership with our Performance Marketing team who managed our brand studies, creative testing, consumer insights testing and our media plan development.

Through consumer insights testing, over the course of the year and a half we were running OCoF ads we saw an average 5–10% increase across all audience segmentations in brand relevance, showing they saw more ways to have fun with GoPro, and that more people are a part of that fun.

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