Nick Hartland
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Nick Hartland •
Hey.
Welcome to my over-the-top website.
I have 6+ years of strategy experience in brand, creative, and social media strategy.
I have a rare combination of experience and skills that gives me the strategic rigor to shape brands into their best form, and the creative imagination and taste to make things that people actually notice and remember.
My superpower is to take the complex and make it simple, then take the simple and make it interesting. In my work, I use tension to get attention and believe the best work is refreshingly unexpected, yet feels inevitable when you see it.
And I’ve done it for all kinds of brands, on every type of brief for all kinds of audiences.
e.l.f. SKIN
Brand Strategy & Global Campaign
Role
Lead strategist on e.l.f. SKIN’s brand strategy, positioning, and campaign. I also worked as a creative, responding to my own creative brief, and coming up with our final big idea.
Challenge
e.l.f. SKIN was overshadowed by its big sister e.l.f. Cosmetics, with very low brand awareness, and no brand meaning.
We were tasked with giving them a role to play in Gen Z Skincare consumers’ lives, ensuring the world would take notice through their Holy Hydration line.
Data showed that Gen Z are the biggest skincare fans, but commit the most ‘skin sins’.
Insights
I couldn’t look past the product name, ‘Holy Hydration!’, which begged the question, ‘What is unholy and evil in skincare?’
How could e.l.f. SKIN resolve this tension of ‘skin sins’ without shaming or pointing the finger at our audience?
Diving into the online community of skincare fans, I noticed the ‘term skin sins’ kept popping up.
Strategic Idea
Creative Idea
Sincare Salvation
We’ll create a devil-like ‘Sinfluencer’ who is tempting you to commit skin sins, only for Holy Hydration to be your salvation.
We spread the word of our salvation everywhere.
And took our campaign across the pond.
The press loved it too
People were tired of the beauty industry’s focus on perfection and outdated idea of self acceptance.
Let’s show that Holy Hydration is salvation from the temptation to commit the 7 Deadly Skin Sins.
But skin sins aren’t your fault.
It’s the work of The Sinfluencer (Megan Stalter).
Our number one goal was to make e.l.f. SKIN relatable. And we clearly succeeded.
+9%
Brand revenue growth
Results
+222%
Online retail purchase volume
+16%
Target audience purchase intent
586M
Earned Impressions
1.1M
New website users
Black Forest
Creative Strategy & Social Media Campaign
Role
Strategy lead on their 2024 Brand Campaign.
Also worked as a creative, with our final idea coming from me.
Challenge
The clients didn’t really give us a problem to solve. But I love problems, so I told them what was holding them back from growth.
Black Forest has a truly great product, with consumer testing showing it was preferred to the far more famous Haribo. The problem is, aside from their very low awareness, their brand had no personality and no POV. Candy should be fun!
Social media review culture was telling me people don’t want to be handed ‘good’, they want to discover the best.
Insights
If a relatively unknown brand is preferred to a famous brand, how could it assert its superiority without resorting to rational product claims?
We know our product is better. So why not put our reputation on the line?
Haribo’s fame and ubiquity could
be used against them by a low awareness brand like Black Forest
Strategic Idea
Creative Idea
The Beary Honest Taste Test
We’ll hook up real people to a lie detector machine to get their honest opinion of who truly is the best gummy bear in the world.
We hit the streets to show that we were truly taking a risk by leaving the verdict to the people.
The best work respects the consumer’s intelligence. Which is my we pushed to make this as real as possible.
Note: as much as we pushed for a head-to-head style taste test against Haribo, the lawyers had other plans.
Influencer product recommendations no longer carry weight. We needed an impartial source.
Get the attention of candy-loves by challenging our more famous competitors to a taste test.
P&O Cruises
Campaign Strategy
Role
Strategist, from client brief to creative brief.
Challenge
The cruise category is as polarizing as it gets. Some people love them. Most hate them.
So imagine being tasked with getting non-cruisers interested in P&O’s new ‘Group Holiday’ product.
The tides were working against us.
Travelers don’t just persist through the pain of organizing a group holiday, they often don’t do the holiday at all.
Insights
How do we take a point of difference, point it toward a pain point and make it an emotive, fun idea?
What if we show that a P&O Group Cruise is the easiest holiday to book that keeps everyone in the group happy?
Research showed that booking a group holiday is a pain in the ass. Everyone wants different things.
Strategic Idea
Creative Idea
Get Your Crew Onboard
We’ll show how easy it is to get a big group of very different people together by casting Rugby players, with each scene playing into each character's idiosyncrasies.
Fully integrated TV-led campaign
Digital, Social extensions
A single ticket on P&O Cruise gives the group on-demand access to a range of activities that can keep everyone happy.
It’s so easy you can get any motley crew together.
GoDaddy
Creative Strategy
Role
Strategist, from client brief to creative brief.
Challenge
GoDaddy was needed to build a brand and acquire customers against far more established and famous brands like Squarespace and Wix.
To make matters worse, their product was inferior (tbh). Australians were aware of GoDaddy, but they didn’t know what they stood for or why they should care about them.
But the truth is, even the famous, ultra-successful ones also faced these paralyzing moments at some point.
Insights
How could we fulfill our positioning toward entrepreneurs in an emotive way?
How do we play a functional & emotive role in an entrepreneur’s leap of faith?
Budding Australian entrepreneurs' unproven ideas caused paralyzing self-doubt. Fair enough!
Strategic Idea
Creative Idea
Go For It For GoDaddy
Show how success is a leap of faith away by telling the stories of real GoDaddy customers that did the same.
TV
Radio
Digital
Social
Podcasts
The successful one’s difference wasn’t their idea or work ethic, it was taking the inevitable leap of faith and trusting their instincts.
Show that building a website with GoDaddy is the first step in the entrepreneur’s dream.
:86 400
Brand Strategy & Launch Campaign
Role
Strategist, from client brief to creative brief.
Challenge
86 400 (now ‘ubank’ after acquisition) was a brand new bank that lived entirely in your phone.
People tend to switch banks once in their life (max), so convincing someone to switch to a new bank, with no core proposition and a very confusing name was a tall order.
86 400 had a number of pretty good features, but they were all powered by AI to learn about the user over time.
Insights
What about this product, with no silver bullet, would make someone want to switch from their big, established bank?
How could we show that 86 400 learning about the customer was ‘smart’ in a category of legacy banks that were...dumb?
Our research showed people want to feel confident in their money. Which is of course category-generic and boring.
Strategic Idea
Creative Idea
It’s Just Smart Banking.
We’ll show Australians that 86 400 operated in a category of one: smart bank.
To break people away from the big 4 banks, we couldn’t just be better, we needed to be a category of one.
Australia’s only ‘smart bank’.
