Case study · Campaign · Experiential · Social · CRM · 2024–26
It's On Flex
The peak season platform, and the street playbook under it
- Year
- 2024–26
- Discipline
- Integrated campaign & experiential
- Role
- Campaign concept, narrative platform, creative direction, activation playbook
Peak season is when flexible workers need money most and when every staffing brand shouts the loudest. Rather than outspend the category, we built a campaign people had to solve.
The insight was unglamorous and universal: everything costs too much. A $60 fill-up. A $15 lunch. Rent, every month. Flexers were already picking up shifts to make life a little easier — so we made Flex pick up the tab.
Underneath it sits the city-launch playbook I built across Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia and New Jersey: street-level activations, local partnerships, QR conversion flows and a Brand Activator handbook, plus the comms layer nobody sees — 134,944 hiring-event messages clicking at 15.09%, which is what turns a scheduled event into a full one.
The line
Life costs a lot. So we’re putting some of it on Flex.
Results
- Committed to Flexers’ living costs
- $25K
- Hiring event SMS click rate
- 15.09%Three times a standard lifecycle message
- Event messages sent year to date
- 134,944
- Assets designed out of one activation night
- 25+
How it was built
One idea. Three experiences.
Gas on Flex took over a single Dallas station for one night and covered the tank. Lunch on Flex rolled pop-up trucks into Dallas and Chicago. Bills on Flex put $25,000 toward real living costs nationally, with every eligible shift earning another entry. Gas and Lunch created the attention; Bills gave everyone a way in.
Don’t announce it. Make them figure it out.
Week one was national and cryptic — something you paid for this week is about to be On Flex. Week two named cities but never addresses. Week three hid the pin behind map clues, landmarks and a blurred photo, dropping the time and location only in the final 24 to 48 hours. The announcement became the show.
Let the city solve it.
The comments were the campaign. Is this free gas? Is it in Oak Cliff? Come to Chicago next. We replied in the same voice — warmer, very cold, you might be onto something — and gated the next clue behind engagement. Right guesses were confirmed in private, never in the thread.
Missions, not scripts.
Creators were briefed with objectives instead of copy decks. One wasn’t allowed to explain what they’d received. One named the city. One held the pin. On activation day the only rule was that it had to be filmed on site, vertical, phone-first — the person, not the wrap.
The activation is the content studio.
We stopped treating events as moments and started treating them as production. One night was designed to yield a hero recap, three creator videos, five reaction films, three street interviews, ten to twenty Stories, a photo carousel, paid edits, UGC reposts and PR. One person captures, one person publishes — a small team can run it when the night is built to be filmed.
The invite does the work.
Hiring event SMS clicks at 15.09%, three times the rate of a standard lifecycle message. Experiential looks like a production problem and is actually a targeting problem: the right message to people within driving distance, at the right hour.
OOH that knows where it is.
Bus tails, static placements and localised takeovers built for specific cities and specific neighbourhoods, in English and Spanish, rather than one national creative stretched over everything.
Systematise it.
The Hiring Event Starter Kit and Brand Activator handbook turned a set of instincts into something a local team could execute consistently — the difference between a good night and a repeatable channel.