Notion: Think It. Make It.

2023 — 2024

As a product and as a company, Notion does...a lot. Its aesthetic is beloved, its devotees are legion. For its 2024 flagship brand awareness campaign, our challenge was to help explain the benefits of a tool that aims to be as useful and flexible as paper — while maintaining Notion’s minimalist rigor.

Our first insight: Many of Notion’s existing visuals — created by their resident superstar illustrator Roman Muradov — showed people at work, in full or medium view.

These highlighted work itself, but what if we could push closer and valorize these characters? What if we could show how vital thoughtfulness, play, and experimentation (a.k.a. the stuff going on inside the mind) have become to modern work?

After months of interviews and close collaboration with Ivan Zhao (Notion’s CEO), Rob Giampetro (Notion’s Head of Creative), Katie Chang (Head of Creative Strategy & Operations), Roman, and a whole host of Notion’s core team, we arrived at three new key developments:

“Think it. Make it.” as the new brand tagline for Notion, and a suite of bespoke headlines for OOH placements that highlighted Notion’s new AI features without being loud or on-the-nose about them...

...a new conceptual foundation for Notion’s OOH illustrations that allowed for (and celebrated!) primary colors, showed close-up profiles of people thinking, and stayed away from literal representations of interfaces...

...and an animated anthem that synthesized all these new ideas into a succinct story, to excite current Notion users and delight users-to-be.

The result: Placements in SF, NY, London, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, and Berlin; 460M+ impressions; significant increases in first-time visitors to Notion’s website/search in key markets; and a new palette — literal and figurative — Notion can play with for years to come.