Movies Anywhere
Brand Update
Three years after the launch of Disney’s Movies Anywhere, my design team launched a quiet retool of the brand—highlighting areas for visual brand improvements and easy wins. The goal was to increase brand consistency and awareness by cleaning up the look and creating an engaging visual brand experience that matched the product experience end to end.
ROLES
Art Director, Designer
DUTIES PERFORMED
Design, Digital Marketing, Print + Web Design, Environmental Design, Product Design
4
STUDIO PARTNERS
Disney, Sony, Universal & Warner Bros.
9
PARTICIPATING RETAILERS
Apple TV, Prime Video, Google Play, Vudu, DIRECTV, FandangoNOW, Microsoft Movies & TV, Xfinity, & Verizon Fios
10 Million
REGISTERED USERS
Across Web, iOS Mobile (iPhone & iPad), Apple TV, Android Mobile & Tablet, Amazon Mobile, Android TV, Fire TV, Roku, & Smart TVs (LG, Vizio, Samsung)
Challenge
Identify areas of improvement within creative, marketing, and product design to tighten brand consistency, improve awareness, and increase recognition. Additionally, Marketing and UX/UI began to redefine Movies Anywhere’s target audience—based on user data, research, and testing—pivoting from millennial moms to movie collectors and evaluating what the most popular owned movies and genres were for them. This helped us pivot toward superhero intellectual property and we analyzed visual commonalities from these properties: What kind of designs were they use to consuming? Our goal was to create a visual brand that fit into content our consumers were already consuming (Twitch, Netflix & Nintendo) and match our product experience (cinematic undertones).
Before & After
2017 Launch Creative
2021 Brand Asset
Solution
Brand Consistency
One of our biggest struggles was the correct logo usage. Many stakeholders preferred to reinforce our mobile app presence in the logo, but as a product design team, we did not have the app icon logo living within our experience. We were able to define usage guidelines that clearly delineated our marketing and promotional logo (app icon) and our in-product/on platform logo (no app icon).
Brand Recognition
We increased logo visibility by retooling the color palette, converting to a dark cinematic theme that created a throughline with the mobile app experience. New dark background colors guaranteed the marketing logo wouldn’t get lost in competing gradient backgrounds. Since this wasn’t a complete rebrand, we shifted the cyan and magenta to secondary colors/accents and did not remove them completely—this added some pop and vibrancy to designs without overwhelming the consumer.
Reducing Visual Noise
We removed our decorative headline font, keeping a modified version only in the logotype. Open Sans became our primary font and easily shareable between all of our Studio, Retail, and Paid partners. By streamlining colors and simplifying our typeface usage, we were able to reduce visual clutter and chaos and allow the content to shine more in designs—hopefully increasing education and awareness.
Finessing Shapes & Movement
Playing off our iconic app icon gradient, we have begun to use singular gradients more prominently throughout both the in-app experience and marketing. We pulled back and eliminated all hexagons for more friendly shapes like circles and curves from the MA symbol. We introduced gradients and motion to represent the hero arch of a movie protagonist or the passion of a movie collector.
Emphasizing Motion
Movies are filled with fluidity and motion. By adding international motion to as many creative assets as possible, we are connecting the cinematic experience with our app experience and relating to our audience.
Delivering Results
After internal approval and sign-off on a new Style Guide, we began a slow rollout on all marketing verticals with both internal channel partners and external Studio Marketing partners. We also held Creative Roundtables with external Studio Creative teams, walking them through the changes, partnering to redeliver necessary assets, and supplying a new shortened Style Guide. Lastly, we presented our new shortened Style Guide to the entire Movies Anywhere internal team in an all-company demo. Both of these meetings created visibility, established new brand parameters, and also created trust between us and our partners—while also establishing us as brand owners and experts. We’ve seen significant tightening and polish on assets coming from other departments and from our Studio partners.
My team is responsible to execute all marketing verticals, including but not limited to:
Brand
• Product Marketing
• Feature Launches
• App Platform Integrations
• Internal Communications (Decks & Presentations)
Acquisition
• App Store Assets & Optimization
• Paid Media
• Brand Spots (Art Direction)
• Blu-ray™ Packaging & Insert
• Studio Redeem websites
Engagement
• In-App Merchandising
• CRM (Emails)
• PR
• Social Media
Brand Spot: For the Collectors
With the new brand refresh, we also debuted a new brand video spot—focused on our new target audience—and emphasizing the brand value of Movies Anywhere to them. Working with the marketing team, we were able to present a visual brand that was ‘got out of the way’ from a very complicated product message and really highlighted the benefits of becoming a Movies Anywhere user.
PROJECT DETAILS
Client // Movies Anywhere (Disney)
Year // 2020
TEAM
Director, Product Design // Guy Schackman
Director, Marketing // Courtney Wachs
Sr. Manager, Editorial // Eric Anderson
Sr. Social Media Specialist // Olivia Duncan
Art Director & Design Manager // Nicole (That’s Me!)
Lead Designer // Chris Sequeira
Production Designer // Allison Rabelo