National Coffee Day
Every year Starbucks celebrates National Coffee Day with a unique and thoughtful owned social campaign. In 2024 the NCD explored what makes a coffee your coffee by highlighting six customer coffee behaviors.
ACD: Jeff Ashley, Taylor Mattson, Writer: Maria McNamara, Designer: Teresa Grasseschi
Process & APPROACH
The timeline for this work was extremely truncated with a week turn around time for final assets out the door. Working closely as a team, we nailed down each campaign story line and illustration perspective in record time. The level of trust and respect needed to operate smoothly with this output speed cannot be understated. Thanks to Taylor, Jeff, and Maria.
The Process
We focused on joyful illustrative gesture as the driver for communicating human connection in each story frame. Scenes use linework, texture, and perspective to define individual movement actions that feel unique and ownable to different customers.
Color work feels bright and playful while remaining core to the Starbucks brand.
Moodboard photographs by Talia Green for Starbucks
The Result
On National Coffee Day the campaign drove 8x the typical Instagram shares while on YouTube Shorts and TikTok shares rose 4x their typical rate making the work one of the most shared illustrated campaigns in the Starbucks NCD history.