Amazing Made Simple

with HERO 11 Black

Redefining the product campaign process and establishing an evergreen art direction for more cohesive global marketing for GoPro

Project Summary

As the Creative Director of Advertising, I worked alongside my Senior Creative Director and the then-ACD of Brand to transform GoPro’s approach to product campaigns, using the HERO11 Black ecosystem launch as a pivotal opportunity. At that time, GoPro traditionally ran two major annual campaigns—the Fall product launch and the Spring/Summer travel campaign—each created independently without a cohesive strategy or consistent brand guidelines. This often led to fragmented creative execution, inconsistent messaging, and missed opportunities to clearly articulate GoPro’s unique value.

To address this, we implemented a strategic shift that established more consistent, year-round marketing and product narratives. We introduced a unified creative process and developed comprehensive brand art direction guidelines to ensure consistency across all product launches. This not only helped streamline creative workflows but also made it easier for our audience to understand the value of our flagship cameras in a crowded market.

This project involved crafting full-funnel advertising strategies—from brand messaging to visual storytelling—while also playing an active role in design. The HERO11 Black campaign marked the beginning of a new approach to integrated, annual campaigns, underscoring GoPro’s ability to capture life’s best moments with the most powerful camera ecosystem on the market. It also included advertising for the HERO11 Black Mini and HERO11 Black Creator Edition, contributing to a more consistent and clear brand message

Services

Art Direction
Creative Direction
Creative Strategy
Campaign Development
Paid Advertising

My Role

Associate Creative Director, Advertising

In Collab WIth

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

Prioritizing the Reason to Care

This likely feels obvious to marketers, but we wanted to focus our campaign, particularly the awareness messaging for HERO11 Black (and future campaigns), on communicating an emotionally-resonate product value to our target audiences.

This wasn’t the typical approach we took at GoPro for new products, oftentimes building campaigns entirely focused on the new features of a camera vs why those new cameras or features or even this company should matter enough to spend your money.

Amazing Made Simple, with GoPro

there to capture your best moments with ease

GoPro believes in the value of living your life to the fullest, experiencing all the world has to offer, and doing so as present-in-the-moment as possible. We talk about immersive capture not only because of the unique ability to capture from your perspective, but because we believe our job is to provide the tools to allow you to focus on the thing you’re doing, while you’re doing it.

Amazing Made Simple was our way to communicate that while HERO11 Black was offering our most powerful set of features to-date, it’s ultimate benefit to customers is the the simplicity it offers. You focus on experiencing life, we focus on making sure those captured moments last you a lifetime.

*To be frank, the ease or simplicity of using a GoPro camera is highly relative to a user’s familiarity with camera equipment, but with features like built-in mounting fingers, voice control and HyperSmooth, the camera arguably provides an immensely powerful set of features with the express purpose of making the capture process as user-friendly and high quality as possible.

Establishing an Evergreen Art Direction to Support the Product (and Brand) Payoff

With the HERO11 Black campaign we were trying to reset how internal creative teams approached developing campaign materials not just within a single campaign, but from one campaign to the next, and one camera to the next.

Rather than generating bi-annual campaigns with new messaging and ephemeral art directions, we sought to develop an art direction that could last us for years. A visual narrative that spoke to our purpose and our payoff as a company. Each camera and each product launch might bring with it some unique flavors to the mix, but the foundation would remain the same.

When Life Meets Tech

GoPro really thrives in the space between life[style] and technology, and we developed an art direction that would look to reflect those two halves of our whole.

Nothing speaks more powerfully to what a camera is capable of than the imagery it produces, so product output was always at the forefront of how we wanted to express our brand, product and feature value. How we expressed what “defined” GoPro output, either by the activities we showed, how imagery was edited, or what type of images we showed, was frequently a challenging and contentious issue for us. Nevertheless, image was king.

Elements like hand drawn type and energetic graphic marks with technical icons and descriptive text worked to add on to our images and messaging, visualizing these opposite but complimentary components (life + tech) of our brand.

Flushing out a Full Funnel Paid Advertising Campaign

We looked to support our campaign message, Amazing Made Simple, all the way down our ad funnel. Each feature ideally spoke to a more specific example of why the HERO11 Black was worth being called amazing, and how these features simplified what you could accomplish with this one tool.

Art Direction & H11 Campaign Creative Collaborators: 
Andy Shiels, Creative Director, Brand | Michael Manny, Senior Creative Director | Jensen Granger, Creative Director, Photography  

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