Data-led design

How data-driven visual optimisation unlocked giffgaff’s highest-performing Black Friday campaign

The diagnostic

Black Friday in telecoms is a visually cluttered battlefield. Traditionally, promotional campaigns are usualy dominated by heavy price slashing, and generic ‘discount’ visuals that lack emotional pull or brand distinctiveness.

When heading into giffgaff’s 2025 Black Friday push, our business goal was ambitious, to maximize conversion on high-value device sales while lifting overall brand awareness within a hyper-competitive window.

The problem
Traditional Black Friday visuals often prioritize short-term promotional messaging at the expense of brand distinctiveness, leading to creative fatigue and lower long-term mental availability.

The strategic insight
Creative effectiveness shouldn’t be based on guesswork. By combining branding and promotional visual language, we performed real-time and quantitive audience testing, in order to systematically optimize our creative response to drive both brand equity and commercial conversion simultaneously.

The design solution

I established a promotional visual system that bridged the gap between high-impact art direction and DR ecommerce visuals. Rather than treating performance design as an afterthought, we engineered every asset around measurable effectiveness drivers.

Optimizing asset hierarchy
I restructured asset layouts around clear visual eye-tracking data. We paired oversised typographic hero messaging with clean product cutouts and high-salience background colors to capture instant attention in digital feeds.

A continuous testing engine
Working closely with insight partners and performance marketing, we established a live feedback loop. We tested variations in copy framing, product contrast, and visual simplicity, rapidly doubling down on high-converting variants and retiring underperforming assets in real time.

The performance & business impact

By backing creative direction with analytical insight, the Black Friday campaign achieved record-breaking retail results while boosting brand visibility across channels.

Key Metric	Performance Result	Strategic & Commercial Impact
Sales Conversion	+18% WoW Sales	Drove a major commercial revenue spike by optimizing asset hierarchy for high-value phone and plan deals during peak trading.
Brand Salience	+2.5pp Ad Awareness Uplift	Expanded top-of-funnel reach and mental availability in an intensely cluttered, competitive Black Friday retail market.
Asset Efficiency	Optimized Creative Performance	Systematically eliminated creative fatigue by using live testing data to double down on top-performing visual variants.

My reflection

This project proved that data and art direction are not enemies, they can work together to become force multipliers. High-performing design isn't just about making assets look good, it’s about engineering systems that respond to real user behavior, in turn driving tangible revenue.

I've come to discover how effectiveness across performance marketing channels can be ramped up through creative diversity, rather than feeding creative variance as weve done in the past.