Stubhub Category Image Case Study

Super Bowl LVIII

  • The Brief

    To find new and engaging ways to portray the StubHub product offering, viewed through web and app.

  • The Process

    How can we begin to package this product in a way that builds the brand?

  • The Deliverable

    The final, the chosen one, the big cheese. Bringing you fresh creative, revamped in all-new packaging.

The Brief

As a brand, StubHub is looking to grow into an organization that provides fierce competition to other primary and secondary ticket-sellers. Creative briefing therefore prompts the following questions as we embark on our journey to shape up the look of the product. Let’s explore:

  1. How should creative represent the central hub for all ticket-exchange and reselling needs?

  2. What does a quality product look like when its main goal is to sell excitement for live events in a post-COVID world? What’s the current direction and how can creative grow in a more sophisticated way?

  3. When and where should the brand rely on various types of media to capture the most accurate representation of what is being promoted?

    Assignment: to explore new art direction and design options using large-scale sporting events like the Super Bowl as a starting point, which generate the most revenue for the organization during active seasons. To the right are a sample of images used to represent the Super Bowl.

The Process

As a starting point for approaching this assignment, I gathered visual references for live creative designed before my joining the organization. To me, it seemed like graphic design options that were being explored at the time were not very fleshed out. Additionally, the brand lacked strategic partnerships that could give creative access to partner branding, trademarked phrases and design elements.

However, that works to the StubHub brand’s advantage. Given my audit of current creative direction at the time, I arrived at the conclusion that there was a lot of opportunity to create stronger ties to StubHub’s branding and to reinforce the organization’s visual identity in their own product environment over that of partner brands.

For original design references, I pulled swipes from classic sports ads that combined bold swatches of color with genre-specific photography of athletes to reinforce ties to a particular sport. I wanted rich colors and textures that felt touchable, immersing consumers into the nitty-gritty of every game. Research was also conducted on the NFL league branding for the 2024 season, as well as on competitor brands such as SeatGeek and Ticketmaster.

The Deliverable

The final visual direction features a blend of photography and design, treating the overall tile with a granular texture to add an element of grit and action. Using selective coloring, we call attention to the genre while also nodding to the league’s style elements through use of gradient as highlight in addition to a blocky sans-serif font (here, the brand font of Druk was used to tie NFL font treatments with StubHub’s brand look).

The design shown on the left here would then be used for email campaigns and marketing as well, resulting in a new style of creative that touches multiple lines of business and bridges the consistency gap between different channels that use visuals.