Thomson Reuters Corporation, a major multinational information and media conglomerate, approached our Havas Hudson & Canal team with a weekly ad buy for Eater Magazine and Car and Driver. Their request was straightforward on paper but required a strong hybrid of design sensibility and technical execution: take their existing print campaign assets and translate them into animated HTML5 banners capable of embedding clicktags to support monetization and performance tracking across multiple CMS systems.

With only a 10-hour window to concept, convert, animate, code, and deliver the full suite, I moved quickly and methodically. I began by converting the raster-based print assets into clean vector components, giving me the flexibility to animate them smoothly and maintain visual crispness across high-resolution digital environments. From there, I built out a series of elegant transitions between slates, ensuring each animation felt premium, cohesive, and aligned with Thomson Reuters’ brand behavior.

Once the motion system was established, I handled the technical integrations — embedding standard and platform-specific clicktags, coding compatibility for ad servers, and packaging the assets to cooperate cleanly with Google FTP pipelines. This step was crucial to ensure accurate tracking, smooth deployment, and monetization visibility for the client’s analytics teams.

The results were unexpectedly strong.

When the Havas account managers pulled the performance data, both they and the client were genuinely surprised: engagement far exceeded projections, and the banners tracked interest outside the initial target demographic, revealing a wider, more diverse pool of prospect engagement. The on-screen behavior validated the creative and the technical approach — and demonstrated how refining motion, pacing, and interactivity can significantly amplify a campaign’s ROI.

I ultimately delivered a full set of animated assets, including 9:16 vertical units and 300×500 HTML5 banners (represented in video format for portfolio purposes, due to platform limitations around hosting .zip files). Each piece was designed, animated, encoded, and delivered to perform seamlessly across CMS systems and paid placements.