Discover Creative Secrets from Our IAC Award Winners

Industry awards are a hallowed tradition in advertising, and at Infillion, we love getting our brand and agency partners some recognition. So we were thrilled to yet again take home over a dozen trophies at the 2023 IAC Awards, a competition that honors digital development on platforms like CTV, mobile, and voice assistants. Our work captured 22 honors in the Online Ads division for 12 different campaigns, including a Best Of Show for our work with Benjamin Moore. Infillion also received the IACs’ Top Agency honor for winning the most points out of any company that entered the awards competition.

We’re really proud of our winners! All of the winning units are deployments of Infillion’s TrueX interactive ad technology, which brings rich immersive creative to desktop, mobile, and CTV – but one of them (scroll all the way to the end!) was also part of a bigger campaign with our brand new InfillionX product. Infillion’s Creative Studio is accustomed to both taking a brand’s existing creative and turning it into an interactive experience, or building an entire new campaign from scratch. These winners run the gamut from shoppable ads to quizzes to even a game inspired by Tetris, showing off just how flexible our technology is.

Want to learn some behind-the-scenes secrets about each campaign? We asked our Creative Studio to share a few.

AMEX – Best Financial Services Online Ad, Best Travel Online Ad

This simple yet effective unit highlighted AMEX’s existing video content for its co-branded credit card with Delta Air Lines, and our Creative Studio matched the design elements, logo, and copy of the side panel to those featured in the video. This seamless, immersive experience was great at holding attention: this unit averaged 48 seconds spent per customer, compared to the 30-second minimum. 

Benjamin Moore – Best Design Online Ad, Best Retail Online Ad, Best Of Show Online Ad

Picking out paint swatches at the hardware store is one of those things you wouldn’t have thought would convert easily to online shopping. But we’ve been working with Benjamin Moore for a few years on doing just this, including an OMMA Award-winning ad in 2021 that was designed to showcase the company’s ability to do just that during COVID (when a lot of people were under stay-at-home orders… and really wanted to change up that living room paint color).

Canon – Best Electronics Online Ad, Best Technology Online Ad

Canon was a first-time Infillion client that was new to the world of interactive storytelling. They came to us with beautiful creative assets that we were able to weave into a compelling interactive narrative for their customers. As it turns out, that one interactive story turned into three, and what started as an ad for a single Canon product turned into a showcase of their whole suite.

Clinique – Best Fashion or Beauty Online Ad

Interactive advertising can offer an in-depth look at the problems that a brand can solve – even if a consumer doesn’t know they might have those problems, or don’t even know they exist in the first place. This Clinique ad was a great example of that, offering a quiz about hyperpigmentation, a common skin condition that even many beauty and skincare aficionados have never heard of. 

Fisher-Price – Best Family Online Ad, Best Shopping Online Ad

With so many products out there today, shopping for kids can be a minefield, especially for non-parents buying products for kids in their lives who may not necessarily be versed in childhood developmental touchstones. This simple two-question quiz allowed Fisher-Price to give customized recommendations for a range of ages and interests, each with individual product photos, copy, and CTA links. The best part about this unit is its adaptability; we swapped out the featured products for other Fisher-Price toys to run this unit for another quarter.

Folgers – Best Beverage Online Ad

This Folgers coffee ad was one of the first-ever campaigns to use our ShopX product, which allows users to add products to their cart directly from the ad. This removes a hurdle in the shopping process, streamlining the path to purchase. This experience featured three different products, each of which can be added to carts at four different national retailers. As a result, what looks like a simple product carousel instead turned into a 12-exit, sales-forward experience. 

LEGO – Best Consumer Goods Online Ad, Best Entertainment Online Ad

Here’s another one of the first deployments of our ShopX product, allowing users to directly add LEGOs to their carts at retailers like Walmart, Target, and in this case LEGO’s own website. A finalist in the Collaboration Award category in last year’s Festival of Media North America Awards, this campaign also showcased how a brand can get longevity out of live events – in this case the LEGOCON 2022 livestream  – by using interactive ads to drive traffic to the video footage of them.

Lunchables – Best Food Industry Online Ad

Lunchables has been inspiring and empowering kids to creatively build their own lunches for generations, so this Tetris-style stacking game felt like the perfect way to bring the magic of Lunchables to the digital realm. (And it’s deceptively difficult!) While this unit first and foremost showcased the complex interactivity that can be built into an Infillion ad, it was also tons of fun (and made the team both nostalgic and hungry).

Intel – Best B2B Online Ad, Best Computer Software Online Ad

This campaign had the challenge of transforming a complex B2B message into an immersive, visually appealing unit while still staying true to Intel’s roots. By utilizing vivid background imagery and fun animations, the Infillion Creative Studio was able to give this unit more life and motion while still staying true to the campaign’s “edge to cloud” service message for the target audience. 

Pinterest – Best Leisure Online Ad

Whether finding inspiration for a fall-inspired outfit of the day to change into from your PJs, or ideas to redecorate your bedroom as you nestle back into bed at night, this dynamic creative featured multiple Pinterest boards directly in the ad that were most relevant to the viewer’s time of day. In other words, this ad’s creative output differed based on when the user was exposed. Not only did this show off the dynamic capabilities of Infillion’s TrueX ads, it also often brought individual users different creative on additional exposures because of the “day-parting.” 

Upwork – Best Directory or Search Engine Online Ad, Best Employment Online Ad, Best Professional Services Online Ad

You probably saw this campaign’s creative on TV – you know, the corporate undead. Upwork came to Infillion to drive viewership of their new :60 musical spot skewering outdated work habits, but the team had to work on an extremely short timeline. This is a great example of where our Blueprints creative technology can step in and get premium, effective interactive ads built quickly. We built this “guided story” ad with our Foundation Carousel Blueprint using key assets that Upwork and their agency UM had on hand.

Wind Creek Bethlehem – Best Hotel & Lodging Online Ad, Best Regional Online Ad

This unit was part of one of the pilot campaigns for InfillionX, our newest product, which can build and deploy a multiplatform, end-to-end campaign with a single media buy. This award-winning TrueX unit was one component of Wind Creek’s InfillionX campaign, which also used rich multiplatform creative to retarget users and measured footfall traffic at the Wind Creek resort to calculate success – and, spoiler alert, it worked. This campaign was aiming to drive both awareness and foot traffic, which are at opposite ends of the traditional “purchase funnel,” and its effectiveness on both metrics has made the Infillion team really excited for future InfillionX success stories.

Want to learn more about how Infillion’s Creative Studio works its magic? Give us a shout, and we’ll be in touch!