Facebook Ads COVID Stickers

Helping small businesses better serve their customers during COVID-19 and beyond.

Ad Illustration

We all have had to adapt to the changes brought on by COVID-19, and that includes small businesses. Many of these small businesses need a way to communicate with their customers about the changes they’ve implemented to their services and offerings in order to better serve them.

Most of these small businesses are new to offering their services online and some are even new to Facebook. A lot of small businesses don’t have the digital assets to communicate through ads on the platform that they’re now online. We wanted to provide them with an illustration that they could use for their Facebook ads. We wanted to make sure it felt different from the Facebook brand and was generic enough to cover a wide range of the businesses that are using Facebook to market themselves. From the beginning, the team had the idea that if we could use transparencies for the illustration and make the background color interchangeable, then we could provide a level of customization that would allow the business to promote themselves in their own voice.

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We decided to use an illustration of a desktop computer, with a coffee mug next to it, to portray that at-home online aspect of the customer experience. We also used geometric tshapes to fill in the white space and make the illustration more attention grabbing. Using the shapes also allowed us to be general enough as to not highlight a specific type of business. Any business, from a hairstylist to a farm stand, could utilize the illustration.

Ad Stickers

The second goal of the project was to create a set of typographic stickers that businesses could place on top of an image to communicate their specific services and offerings. Our team, along with the Facebook team, brainstormed a list of actionable and informational sayings and then narrowed them down to a list of ten. We then took those ten sayings and started sketching out various ideas for each of them. Our strategy was to communicate the concepts through small illustrations accompanied by lettering, so that the stickers could stand alone, but also feel like a cohesive set.

We used a limited color palette that could be applied to a wide array of various businesses. Each sticker has the potential to be placed on millions of different images, so it is important that they are legible on dark, light and busy backgrounds.

It was really rewarding to create something that was helping small businesses during a time where they were struggling and needing to adapt to COVID-19. In the first month of the sticker set release, they have been the top used stickers! Compared to other sticker categories, over 22,000 small businesses are using them. Due to the successful adoption, Facebook is beginning plans to translate the stickers into multiple languages so that they could be adopted globally.