WeTransfer
Building equity for the global creative community

The challenge
WeTransfer’s flagship thought leadership piece, the Ideas Report, has become a respected annual reflection on the state of the global creative community.
But given the ever-changing landscape of creative culture, we recognized the opportunity to go much deeper– using macroeconomic and predictive cultural data to explain seismic shifts in creatives’ relationships to work, place, and identity.
Over a multi-year partnership, we transformed WeTransfer’s approach to thought leadership: expanding their approach from an annual ‘state of the union’ to an an always-on, predictive platform and the creation of unique data-driven thought leadership campaigns.
Decode

To understand the creative community better than anyone else, we set our sights on the places they call home. Urban planners, psychologists, and futurists often define what makes a city ‘creative’ through an academic index or diagnostic tool. What would it mean to build an index that more truly reflected WeTransfer’s creative audience? Instead of looking towards the usual suspects in the US—like New York City, LA, or Austin—we set out to find the unexpected communities that are building a name for themselves in the creative industries. We identified these cities through analysis of WeTransfer’s product usage data and creative growth per city, and scored each city on key factors we heard in research are most important to creatives.

Recode

The result: the Emerging Creative Hubs Index – a proprietary platform we created to map creative ‘critical creative mass’ in cities across America. Our index algorithm, website and campaign identified the “unexpected creativity” in 10 cities around the United States, profiling each city based on qualitative, man-on-the-street interviews and sit-down ethnographies with local experts and activists. In accordance with WeTransfer’s “by creatives, for creatives” ethos, we commissioned original stories, art, and photography to represent these creative communities.


The platform experience also included a quiz module to determine the reader’s ideal Creative Hub city – driving deeper interaction and social conversation.

Transform

The Emerging Creative Hubs platform launched alongside a national grant program distributing money to creative nonprofits working to support and empower the creative communities within our Index cities.

As part of our partnership, we’ve also collaborated with WeTransfer on revamped editions of their annual Ideas Reports – these sites have been recognized by It’s Nice That, Awwwards, and FWA, and garnered two Webby wins.



Marshall Group
Creating a culture-led growth strategy for an audio pioneer
