‘Twas the Year of Awards
To celebrate our 2024 awards, we wrote a little holiday poem.
‘Twas the end of the year, and across all the halls,
The awards were displayed, lined up on the walls.
Our websites were crafted with strategy and care,
In hopes that digital transformation would soon garner flair.
The LPGA shone with its UX delight,
Winning two Gold MarComs, what a glorious sight!
For Website and Redesign, our work earned acclaim,
In the world of women’ s golf, we elevated the game.
Atlantic Health System brought challenges bold,
But we answered the call, bringing two MarCom Golds!
For Illustration, Homepage, and design so refined,
Their brand and their care were beautifully aligned.
With Platinum eHealthcare for Mobile to start,
Our work touched their patients and warmed every heart.
From Site Design Gold to Heart Risk Interactive,
Our tools for conditions and treatments were truly adaptive.
At UNC Health, the bar was set high,
But our websites soared, reaching for the sky.
With Platinum and Golds for design and homepage,
Their digital presence lit up like the stage.
And one more great honor, so fitting this year:
Optimizely One Partner of the Year, we cheer!
Through strategy, craft, and experience combined,
Hero’s impact is felt, by design so aligned.
So here’s to the clients, our partners, our team,
Together we’ve made this a year like a dream.
May the next bring new stories, new heights to attain,
For Hero Digital, the pursuit will remain.
🎄 Happy Holidays! 🎄
Great Things Happen When Creative and Tech Play Nice
Lennon and McCartney. Jobs and Wozniak. The Wolverine and Deadpool.
Each of these epoch-defining collaborations share one thing in common: their success is rooted in the push-and-pull of rivalry.
The same is true of the collaboration between creative and development teams—sure, the final product may look to the outside world like the result of a harmonious professional relationship, but as anyone who has worked in the agency world knows, the real story is often a little more complicated.
To better understand the collaboration between our creative and development teams on Hero’s recent Atlantic Health Systems redesign project, I spoke with Marc Tremblay and Tim Drabandt. Marc is a Director of Business Analysis and served as the primary liaison between the two teams. Tim is a Senior Creative Director, and he led our creative team on this account.
The conversation below has been highly edited for clarity and concision.
Q: How did the creative team’s vision influence the technical direction of the project? And what about vice versa?
Marc Tremblay: It’s a constant negotiation between the two teams to ensure we’re building something that’s feasible but also not stifle creative design and exploration. On Atlantic Health, the development and creative teams were in constant communication, trying to find a middle ground between respecting the designs and the most efficient way to execute them.
Tim Drabandt: I would say it a little differently: we had a clear, defined sandbox in the form of a design system. Some people think design systems put creatives into a box but, to Mark’s point, there is still a back and forth, even within a defined design system. What we were able to do through collaboration was make sure that design and development were actually working in concert to create a more strategic, iterative improvement cycle.
For example, imagine the design team decides to build two different components. The dev team might say to us, hey, those components may look different to you guys, but on the backend they are actually pretty much the same, so why don’t we just build one component that has some flexibility?
That’s the benefit of having teams that are really engaged in a conversation—over time, you create efficiencies through teamwork instead of one team just passing a set of deliverables to the next team on the assembly line.
Q: Were there any big ideas that came out of your collaboration?
Marc Tremblay: I think if there was one area where we went the extra mile, it would be the Find a Location experience. When Tim and I took a step back from what we had initially created for Find a Location, it just didn’t feel like we had hit the mark. There was too much clutter for the user experience to be consistent.
And then we started to ask ourselves tough questions—are we really designing something of value here? Are we adding more value to the user where they really need it?
I really believe that having open communication naturally brews a value-based model of design and development.
Tim Drabandt: Right, and that means there has to be an openness and a willingness to accept that feedback. I remember Marc calling me late on a Friday and telling me: we have to fix these location cards. Admittedly, we all had been staring at the problem for so long, we were missing a key objective. Having someone with fresh eyes looking at it and saying we can do better—it made all the difference.
Q: Does that example speak to the value of doing the development work ourselves instead of passing it off to the client’s in-house team or a third party?
Marc Tremblay: For Atlantic Health, I think we could have created the same experience and passed it off to another development team, but I don’t think the same experience could have been executed and delivered on time. When any piece of work is passed off, knowledge is lost. Our development team was involved from the beginning, involved in the creative process, and that meant we really understood the clients’ goals beyond just technical requirements.
Tim Drabandt: Whether the development team is internal or external, they have to be fully integrated into the design process. This enables teams to have strong empathy for the problems others are trying to solve, which has an impact when it’s your turn to actually execute their solution.
Q: Did your collaboration change how you think about the roles of tech and creative?
Marc Tremblay: To me, it’s all about not being territorial in our work going forward. My role is to protect the downstream impacts for the development team, and that’s fine. On Atlantic Health, the creative team took the time to educate me and my team on where they were coming from. And that empowered my team to make more informed decisions because they understood the design team’s intent.
Tim Drabandt: We’ve also been employing this method going the opposite direction: we used creative to validate all the technical solutions that Marc’s team brought to the table. It’s a different way of thinking about the relationship between tech and creative—instead of a creative team simply telling a development team what to make, our job is to prove how a technical solution can be implemented and provide value to the overall experience.
Q: Are there any lessons from our Atlantic Health work that we can take to future healthcare clients?
Marc Tremblay: I’m actually working with Tim and some other Heroes on a design accelerator for healthcare organizations. Basically, it’s a way for us to avoid starting from scratch with new healthcare clients. Internally, that means we’re taking learnings about design systems, nomenclature, and components to help us work much more efficiently in the future. But it also involves things on a more operational level, like having a set of specific intake questions. Where are their patients located? Are they regional? How many and what type of facilities do they offer? How many doctors do they have? That will help us decide questions like, Do we really need to spend tons of time and money designing and building a tool that searches for the closest clinic if a healthcare system only has a few locations?
Tim Drabandt: It goes beyond trying to change how we work internally—it’s also about helping improve our client’s outcomes. We’re trying to build a system that helps us better locate the precise problems we are trying to solve for.
But honestly, healthcare is not that different from finance or consumer goods or any other industry. Sure, it has its own terminology and unique sets of audiences and challenges, but no matter what industry we’re working in, it’s all about figuring out as precisely as we can: what is the problem we’re solving for? If we look at our work through that lens, we can drive outsized impacts for our clients.
Coca-Cola Tried AI “Holiday Magic”—and It Bombed
Does AI dream of electric Christmas scenes? Coca-Cola sparks debate with a new take on an old holiday classic.
Editor’s note: Miana is our Senior Copywriter and unofficial Chief Holiday Officer. She takes festive expertise to the next level. No, seriously—during the holidays, it’s like she’s running on pure peppermint brilliance. Between being merry and bright, she still finds time to write killer copy for our clients—because even Santa needs a side hustle.
Coca-Cola’s holiday ads have been a staple of the festive season for as long as the big jolly guy’s beard has been white. You know the ones—the Coca-Cola Polar Bears (or Coca-Cola-Polas, as I like to call them), and the cherry-red trucks blazing their way through snowy lanes, delivering Coke to holiday villages as if the residents’ lives depended on it.
So when Coca-Cola decided to revamp their holiday classic for 2024, this time with the help of AI, let’s just say, the internet wasn’t impressed.
Not always the real thing
In the new spot, Coca-Cola swapped the authentic-feeling magic of the original campaign for AI-generated magic. And instead of evoking that warm, fuzzy feeling we all associate with the brand’s holiday ads, these new commercials left folks thirstier than ever for the classics.
The AI-generated animation, while ambitious, has been criticized for feeling off, with townspeople looking more like town giants, and character close-ups that feel more uncanny valley than holiday cheer.
Not to mention that the carolers’ chorus reaches a crescendo on the lyric, “‘Tis the season, it’s always the real thing”—even though this ad’s animation is distinctly not the real thing. The verse has since been edited out of the brand’s official YouTube video, making the irony hard to miss.
This artificially intelligent holiday cheer has been met with some choice words in the comments section on YouTube:
“Nothing like celebrating the spirit of Christmas with the most soulless commercial possible.”
“I don’t know why everyone’s saying this ad’s so terrible. Best Pepsi commercial I’ve seen in a while”
“The irony of the “Real Magic” tagline at the end of an AI commercial.”
“Always the real thing” OH the IRONY! 🤣”
Synthetic Santa wants your memories….
The accompanying “Create Real Magic” snow globes—an interactive, AI-powered digital activation—invite us to make our own machine-made enchantment. All you have to do is speak to Simulation Santa, answer a few of his prying questions about your special holiday memories, and BOOM—your own personalized snow globe is rendered based on your responses, complete with your own unique holiday jingle.
Here are a few standouts from their gallery, created by procrastinators like me from around the world:
I’ll admit, it was a really fun concept, and I may have spent an hour or two of my workday looking at uploads from around the world (don’t tell my boss). But the execution still feels like a misstep, with many of the commenters saying a version of this:
“You’re a multi-billion dollar company. Hire some animators.”
And they may have a point.
But perhaps that’s a problem with AI art in general: can something created with AI still be called art? Or is it just a clever imitation? Does it even matter? All art is meant to evoke emotion, sure, and AI artwork definitely has people feeling strong emotions. But in the case of Coke’s holiday campaign, it feels more like an awkward gift exchange: thoughtful in concept, but mismatched in execution.
How I learned to stop worrying and love AI
I like AI. I work with AI every day. And even as a lover of classic advertising, I like this campaign too. The concept is solid and the story is sound.
So why is everyone so PO’ed?
Because there are pieces of Americana so deeply rooted in our culture that even when more modern iterations come along, the masses would rather cling to the old than level up to the new. Ultimately, It’s not about progress—it’s about preserving the feeling. Nostalgia, it turns out, doesn’t charge well on a USB-C.
Here’s the thing, though: in advertising, sometimes the conversation is the goal, and Coca-Cola has undeniably ignited one. Maybe this is the kind of disruption they were aiming for—a bold leap into the future that’s meant to get us all talking, even if it feels a little uncomfortable. After all, shaking up tradition isn’t exactly new for Coke—it’s just that this time, the fizz has a weird aftertaste.
Will they learn from this year’s stumble and bring the magic back? Or are they just ahead of the curve in this next wave of AI-fueled campaign creativity? Let’s ask ChatGPT:
Can SEO Really Help You Finally Buy the Right Gift?
Keith Maxwell, our resident SEO guru, digs into his toolbox to answer the most pressing gift-giving questions.
Okay, who needs the most help buying gifts?
“Wife” comes out on top in terms of search volume. So, big shock, guys need the internet to help them figure out what to buy their wives for Christmas.
So does that mean more men are searching for gift ideas?
Turns out, men and women are neck and neck when it comes to search volume. However, women came out on top, with 52,649 to 52,606.
But here’s where it gets really interesting—searches related to gifts for women contain modifiers such as “great” and “unique” and “best.” For men, the most common modifier is “small.”
Men, you get “small” gifts.
Speaking of modifiers, what type of gift are most people looking for?
For overall modifiers, the most common search was for “unique” gifts. Apparently, people really want to give gifts that no one asked for!
Can you answer the biggest question of all—who is really the star of the holiday season?
This should not come as a shock—the most searched family member, and the person we all care the most about, is… mom.
HUGE changes are coming in 2025
Hero Digital and Huge are combining forces, Avengers-style, to bring our creative superpowers to even more clients.
Would you rather get the present of your dreams, or give the present of their dreams?
Every month, we get together to discuss life’s most important questions. Cast your vote on LinkedIn