Index
Case
02 of 06
Xeneta
2025
From static to motion
Two product launches that needed the difference in the data to be visible in seconds.
Role
Brand & Design Manager Creative Conceptualisation Design Strategy & Execution
— Creative direction
— Motion design
— Campaign messaging
— Film direction
Context
Product Launch GTM Campaigns
With
Product, product marketing, marketing demand generation & campaigns
Year
2025
A specialist scrolling a feed gives a data platform a few seconds at most.
Xeneta had launched two products built on significantly improved data and offering than the category was working from, and the market hadn’t registered it. The difference was real but took effort to see.
Context and challenge
The difference was real and nobody could see it
Xeneta launched two products that widened the value proposition and the competitive position. Air freight intelligence was rebuilt on datasets that reflect the market more accurately than what the category had been working from, and Ocean Schedules introduced granular schedule data not available elsewhere.
Buyers stayed with long-established competitors running older data. Paid click-through was running at 0.2 to 0.6 percent, and awareness of what separated Xeneta was low. Understanding
This was a creative problem, not a media one. Better targeting only puts the same unreadable message in front of a more relevant audience.
My role
Messaging with product, plan with campaigns
I worked with product marketing and the product teams to establish what actually differentiated each product and to shape the messaging around it. With the campaigns manager I built the campaign and distribution plan, weighted deliberately toward video so we could get evidence on two open questions: which storytelling approaches hold this audience, and how video performs against static in the same placements.
Approach
A data product can show a market moving
Xeneta's products are complex platform interfaces. The technical case is detailed and unusable in a feed in its original form, so the problem was compression: reduce it to something absorbed at a glance, then test which version of that compression holds attention.
My hypothesis was that a data product has one advantage in a feed that a competitor’s reputation cannot answer, which is that it can show a market moving. Static creative sets that advantage aside and competes on headline alone, and on headline alone the better-known name tends to win by default.
Considerations
What the creative had to hold
Volume at pace. Campaigns needed a continuous stream of assets across the quarter, not a single hero execution.
Performance could not cost the brand. The standard failure mode is that creative optimised for click-through erodes the positioning it runs under. I set consistency with the 2022 identity as a constraint rather than a trade-off.
Highly technical source material. The product case was strong, detailed, and unreadable at feed speed.
Section label
Your heading goes here
Your body copy goes here. Write in the same editorial voice as the rest of the case.
Design decisions
Motion as the default, format as a variable
Static to motion. Short looping sequences carrying information and showing a market in movement, rather than motion applied decoratively to a static layout.
Compress before designing. Product supplied the GTM strategy and the technical case. The work was finding the version a specialist absorbs in seconds, then holding to it against the pressure to add more.
Format as a variable. I didn’t want format settled in the brief. Across this programme, running variants against one another accounted for more of the improvement than any single execution did.
AI in production. Faster iteration meant more versions tested inside the same timeline, which is the mechanism behind the performance change rather than a tooling note.
What shipped
Product hero films
Paid and organic creative across both launches, built as motion by default, plus a hero film directed with an external production house.
Results
Paid click-through moved from the pre-campaign baseline into a range roughly three times higher, sustained across executions rather than driven by one. Several executions converted and generated leads directly. Creative was the variable I controlled, and audience definition and budget also changed over the same period.
Paid click-through, before
0.2 to 0.6%
Paid click-through, after
0.5 to 1.8%
Organic carousel click-through
19.75%
Organic carousel engagement
21.59%
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