Keysight

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After splitting into a separate company in 2013, Keysight struggled to update their branding beyond incremental and functional changes. A few false starts later, I was brought on to create the largest brand refresh in the company’s history — ranging from logo and collateral to marketing campaigns, film and animation, and product packaging. The result is Keysight’s first fully realized and full-featured brand suite that spans its entire creative output.

My Role

• Lead rebranding efforts for Keysight Technologies and its subsidiaries in the brand’s first large-scale overhaul in 7 years.
• Design, art direct, develop, and pitch the brand expression, guidelines, templates, best practices, and final assets for brand, digital and out-of-home ads, website, content creation, collateral, social media, packaging, iconography, photography, video, and animation.
• Collaborate with stakeholders, c-suite, brand, marketing, and content teams, agency partners, and vendors to drive buy-in on company goals.
• Build and manage timeline, priorities and key objectives, and company-wide brand adoption ensuring planned milestones are met.
• Plan and oversee tiered asset rollout across 70 worldwide offices with 14,000 employees.
• Designed and developed a brand-level content marketing platform for the new brand marketing team to expand reach to more senior clientele.

Ads are social now

As with most brands now, the line between digital advertising, social outreach, and content creation is blurring, and I knew that we needed ads, social templates, and art direction that could move between digital projects. This allows creators and marketers to move and test quickly coming up with creative for campaigns as the data is rolling in. I also devised a system to only introduce secondary assets and swatches as the audience moves past first-touch interactions. This moves Keysight to its ultimate goal of increased brand recognition across all first-touch channels.

Physical is digital too

As lines blur, it’s always important to take a look at (hard scare quotes) “traditional mediums” to find opportunities to innovate. With Keysight’s massive array of promotional and educational literature, I found occasion to create full-spread, full-bleed beautifully, printable documents with interactive features that impressed equally in the digital world.

Templates don’t have to suck

Keysight has tens of thousands of employees that need to generate content for learning, marketing, promotion, and sales, and this content needs to uphold the brand while actually working in a variety of programs and media. From Powerpoint to After Effects and online platforms, we’ve created enough assets to keep Keysight on brand in its smallest expression.

Guidelines that work across 10,000+ users

It can be difficult to get a small team to read and follow guidelines, not to mention thousands of employees and contractors creating the Keysight brand. By adopting a community style of brand enforcement, we were able to change their philosophy of brand generation and allow employees to use interactive brand guidelines and DAMs, brand resources, brand hotlines, and brand promotions to make sure that the new brand went company-wide on day one of release.

Content Hub

One of Keysight’s biggest pivots with this refresh was a focus on content marketing in addition to their known performance marketing approach. With this new ground, we needed to create a brand experience that focused on content. We created a new content hub design, a content strategy, and a more direct and sophisticated brand voice for Keysight’s Discovery platform.