Case:
building the
bol. brand
In 2016, bol made a giant leap: To rebrand in order to unify it’s e-commerce diversity, to simplify client usability and increase the Net Promoter Score as brand value KPI.
The foundation that was set out was what it largely still is today: simplicity, humor and humanness. A new font, a new style in copy, a new colour pallette and a new visual vocabulary.
The strong brand bol had built via TV commercials was a value that needed onboarding, yet conversion goals and customer journey optimisation was the foundation of the Ask.
Within this demanding ecosystem, the business case to internalise visual asset creation was born: from proof, to onboarding, to full scale execution and scaling.
The expectation of the in-house approach was always agency level quality, but with deeper and faster collaboration with creative teams, increased data insight and close stakeholder teamwork.
In doing so, not only did this increase the NPS score, cut agency spend dramatically, it helped put bol. on the map as the dominant player it is today.
At bol, I drove the strategic and structural transformation of the brand’s visual content operations, together with a small team of high level creative producers. I spearheaded the evolution of our visual capabilities, starting from the creation of a small studio and securing the mandate to scale it into a high performing, multi-team content production ecosystem spanning video, photography, and future AI development.
By streamlining creative workflows and deepening the collaboration between copy, art direction, and marketing, I successfully transitioned major B2C campaigns—including Out-of-Home, short commercial films, DE&I/ internal communication and the iconic Speelgoedboek from external agencies to our in-house studio.
Beyond day-to-day production oversight, I concerned myself with impact and conversion of the visual strategy through panel research, data sweeps, gathering feedback to optimize customer journey interaction, and evangelizing our visual identity to internal stakeholders.
From recruiting top creative talent to laying the foundation for AI machine learning, my focus has been on future-proofing bol’s visual output and building a scalable, world-class in-house agency, and thereby transferring roughly 80% agency spend to internal budgets.
Your in-house creative agency
Let’s do that coffee and have a look at how we can build your wow-campaign, or how you can become that super-magnetic-employer-brand.
Or build a library of visual assets that will leave friend and foe stunned for years to come. And in doing so, aim at cutting out the ad agency!
