Working at ArchDaily
What is like to work at the world’s most visited architecture website?
Working at ArchDaily has been an amazing experience. You can find our headquarters located at the end of the world (Santiago, Chile), full of committed people doing what they love.
On The Hype Team our mission is to lift ideas through design. Our clients; Architects, native internet users and companies — are very demanding and we enjoy meeting their challenging demands.
Our main design guideline is “less is more”, a phrase borrowed from famous 20th century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. We need to communicate as much as we can and as simply as possible.
Building of the Year 2016 Experience
The Building of the Year Awards bring together all the projects published during a year, with architects nominating their favorite projects for the honor. In fourteen categories, five finalists are selected and then users vote to name one the winner of the category.
We had the esteemed tasks of producing the awards, and sending them to the winning architects and teams.
This year we developed our online campaign in a very different way, making an upgrade to our creatives, by using less resources to generate more impact. It all started last year, by defining the slogan with the editorial team: “It’s Time to Reward The Architecture You Love”. We reuse it because it’s a strong message to attract our readers. Also because we wanted to make them feel like part of the process. We wanted something that emphasized the opportunity to provide feedback and recognition to the projects they see everyday on ArchDaily.
We did our usual research for references that inspired us. We selected the following examples from DesignSpiration.com as interesting concept inspirations for our campaign.
We proceed to analyze the chosen references and study together what made them visually attractive. We thought of this graphic and emotional resources as applied to an architectural context. Some of them worked, others didn’t. We chose simplicity, elegance, focus, mystery and black as the main concepts to develop. Architects feel especially attracted to these ideas.
“Using the award as the main element of the campaign — iconic and recognizable — . We wanted to generate protagonism, mystery and aspiration for the award; an object that rewards the best architecture in the world”.
Then, we experimented with what we had:
- Camera Canon t4i + 50mm 1.8 lens
2. Led Spotlight
3. Black Sponge Pad: To build the stage
4. A Dark Room
Making Of
These videos were recorded in our HQ’s basement in a couple of hours. We did different trials:
- Composition Left (click to watch video)
- Composition Center (click to watch video)
The central image would be a still from the video:
Nominate Now
For the first stage of the competition, all published projects are voted on by our users. This is the first call:
Watch here the video for instagram + social media.
Vote Now
The second stage is the voting for one of the five finalists per category. The campaign now uses the original mp4 turned into a GIF, format supported by our ad manager.
See The Winners
The last campaign was designed to promote visibility for the winners.
The same competition takes place in Latin America, called “Obra Del Año” in all Spanish speaking websites (ArchDaily Colombia, Perú, México and Plataforma Arquitectura.cl)
This is the final stage in the Spanish version.
The Results
The campaign was a success and we had never had so many users voting for the competition. This is for different reasons, we think one of them was the attractive campaign displayed and the awesome response from our users, who are so committed to architecture.
The following results represent ArchDaily.com, ArchDaily China, ArchDaily Brasil in our ad units for run of site campaigns:
- The CTRs were 0.15% for a 2.5 million impressions campaign on the first stage in ArchDaily.com. In ADBR 0.15% and in ADCN 0.21%.
- The second stage was 0.25% for all websites in a 1.2 million impressions campaign.
- The final stage had a 0.4% CTR in a 1.5 million impressions campaign.
We worked along with all teams: Editorial and Audiovisual. What we appreciated most is the freedom to work with any materials and any team member across ArchDaily. What we loved the most was doing more with less.
Fiorentina Domínguez | Hype Manager
Soon: What The Winners Take Home