Mosaic Group
THE PROJECT
I joined the Mosaic Group, part of IAC, as Global Creative Director to form their centralized Creative Department. Mosaic Group is a mobile app developer with an award-winning portfolio of brands and products with 1 billion downloads and 40 million+ monthly active users. We build and acquire best-in-class mobile applications, providing creators with a platform to reach global audiences along with the inspiration, support and resources to innovate new products. Owned and operated by IAC (NASDAQ: IAC), Mosaic Group is a global company headquartered in New York City. www.mosaic.co.
SCOPE
I specialize in developing in-house agencies and my goal was to create replicable systems, uncover insights, and creative successes that can be applied to the creative work for every product in our portfolio (50+ applications). We also were striving to shift from purely performance marketing to a blended branded performance hybrid approach ‘brandformance’ to gain more recognition from each ad impression, and position the Creative team as strategic thought partners to our Marketing Dept and keeping up with always-on creative demand to support a $60M+ annual marketing spend.
SOLVE
I joined in mid-July 2022 and by October 2022, our first merge brought the Teltech and iTranslate designers together (15 designers). By January 2023, we completed our second merge, adding in Apalon and Phoenix teams and coupled with strategic organizational design and hiring efforts, I filled out a robust department of over 30+ designers and copywriters. I formed Pods based on their areas of specialization from Marketing Designers (statics and motion), to Brand Designers, to Copy (long and short form) to Creative Operations (project managers), and ensured everyone had clear roles and north-stars through Department vision planning. I also cultivated clear growth plans for my 6+ leader-level direct reports, and assisted with company-wide onboarding, 30-60-90s, and career leveling matrixes.
I created systems from request intake to project management, through auditing designers’ skillsets paired with a mantra of ‘right person, right role’ creating internal mobility and career development from specialized trainings, to improving and streamlining our tool offerings and OpEx budgets ($500k annual) by assessing our needs and cutting duplicative programs. I implemented time tracking, creative dashboards, developed a creative-win-rate metric in partnership with marketing, and created visibility into the team’s creative production in a way the organization had never experienced. In our data-driven org, we now had the metrics to prove our wins, from ticket intake to completion rate, but better still, a way to measure and judge the quality of the creative based on its performance. Most importantly, through weekly design reviews and team inspiration sessions, we honed our own gut-check of what is good and cultivated an environment where we are producing work we are proud to show.
I was personally accountable for supporting our $160M ARR, $20M EBITDA portfolio with our always-on marketing creative that helped us achieve our metrics and maintain a 1.5+ LTV:CAC performance outcome with our partners in Marketing. These efforts generated more than 50M paid downloads annually.
My newly formed campaign-team builds out in-depth campaign calendars, delivering assets for our core channels, including 7 net-new multi-million-dollar marketing revenue streams across Mosaic’s consumer portfolio: Growth + Conversion Rate Optimization, B2B Marketing, TV Advertising, Public Relations, SEO, CRM and Social Media. This included driving a web-to-app motion with SEO-driven blog posts, demand gen with TV spots, PR-focused e-books and reports, direct mailers, in-app messaging, push notifications, email campaigns, podcasts, Apple search ads, Google Display Network and YouTube ads, Facebook/Meta advertising for paid social, organic social tone of voice development, and more.
Thanks to positive performance from the current team, and my work operating as a strategic partner to the C-suite to deliver visibility into the Department and as a cross-functional collaborator with teams across the organization, we executed a final merge to bring the Product Designers, UX and localization writers into the umbrella, and I now oversee all the designers in the organization (45 designers and copywriters) as VP, Design.
See a snippet of the organizational design work done below, plus internal branding and swag efforts at the very end.
Team
LEADERSHIPKathleen Barrett, CEO
Mark Lavoritano, CPO
Mike Vannucci, CMO
Giulia Porter, VP, Marketing
Laila Grainawi, VP, Design
DESIGN LEADS
Rachel Sanfilippo, Director, DesignOps
Thomas Greenhalgh, ACD
Zlatko Klemenic, Lead Brand Designer
Crissy Milazzo, Lead Brand Strategist
Emily Cheng, Lead Digital Designer
Sarah Flores, Lead Copywriter
Stanislau Baukinvoch, Lead Motion Designer
Alexsandra Makovara, Lead Marketing Designer
And many others from within my department who helped us deliver on the goals we set out to achieve.