Filed

The brief

Facebook advertising offered enormous potential for businesses, but by 2017 the platform had become increasingly complex. Small and medium-sized businesses often lacked the knowledge or resources to build effective campaigns, while poorly structured advertising could quickly waste budget. Filed set out to make that process simpler.

Its proposition was an AI-powered platform that learned from campaign performance within specific industries, guided users through campaign creation and continually optimised activity once live. I worked alongside the AI specialist developing the underlying technology, leading the brand and designing the experience that brought the proposition to life.

The brand challenge

AdTech brands often rely on a familiar visual language: cold blues, dark interfaces, performance charts and technical terminology. While this can communicate credibility to experienced advertisers, it can also make the technology feel intimidating to smaller businesses.

Filed needed a different personality. The brand had to feel like it was on your side — approachable and human to someone new to advertising, while retaining enough confidence and credibility to appeal to experienced marketers. The challenge was to make sophisticated technology feel accessible without making it look simplistic.

The brand needed to speak to people who wanted results, not people who wanted to understand algorithms.

Visual identity decisions

The colour palette was one of the most deliberate creative decisions. I chose sky blue and coral — warm, energetic and distinctly human — to break away from the cold corporate blues that dominated the AdTech space. The palette communicated "friendly and capable" rather than "technically impressive but intimidating" and gave the brand a recognisable personality.

Bringing the brand to market

The website was Filed's primary sales channel. As a subscription-based SaaS product, it needed to communicate the proposition clearly, build confidence and guide visitors towards a free trial without relying on a sales team. I developed the information architecture and visual approach around a straightforward narrative: establish the problem, introduce the solution and provide the evidence to support it.

Filed's proof points, such as an 80% reduction in campaign build time, were set as statistic tiles designed to do meaningful work on the page. Bold enough to catch attention, while presented clearly as evidence supporting the proposition. Lifestyle photography against the brand colour blocks brought warmth and personality to the information.

• Website structure and design created to explain the proposition and guide visitors from the landing page to a free-trial sign-up.
• Motion and video content developed to explain the AI proposition in language non-technical users could understand.
• Marketing collateral and social assets built around the same visual system, maintaining a consistent brand across touchpoints.
• Product UI designed alongside the identity so the experience inside the platform felt like a natural extension of the brand.

The outcome

Filed launched with a distinctive brand identity, a conversion-focused website and a product experience designed to make sophisticated advertising technology more accessible to non-specialist users.

By positioning the proposition around business outcomes rather than technical complexity, the brand gave Filed a more approachable presence in a crowded AdTech market, with the identity, website, product and marketing working as one experience.

The product's longer-term development was later affected by changes to Facebook's API policies. The brand and design thinking behind it — making complex technology clear and approachable — is the same approach I've since applied to consumer ecommerce.