A whirlwind experience of ups and downs
April 2018 – October 2020
If you have any affinity to music, events, festivals or travel, you’ve probably already heard of Pollen. If you haven’t, they were a ticketing platform that went from being one of the biggest players in the industry, to a bankrupt, controversy-laden scam likened to Fyre Festival.
I could easily get side-tracked on Pollen’s headline-making infamy, and far be it from me to criticise a former employer. So I’ll let the guys at Sky, Business Insider, Mixmag and New York Post take care of that.
I joined Pollen (then known as Verve) back in Spring 2018 as a Copywriter, and was thrown head first into the deep end of the tech and start-up world.
As the first and only content and copy specialist, I was lucky enough to work across all areas of the business, including CRM, Product, Design, Marketing, Social, Video, Ops and People.
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Project: Pollen Insider
Pollen Insider is among the most substantial projects of my career: a standalone editorial platform to support Pollen’s marketplace and boost engagement with the brand.
Through articles and features about music and events, we wanted to establish Pollen as a leading voice of the industry akin to the likes of Resident Advisor.
I led the strategy, ideation and design, and recruited informed, knowledgable writers deeply imbedded within the scene. The content needed to distance itself from the typically-transactional language and approach of Pollen, and speak exclusively to the scene and the industry.
For an in-depth look at what went on behind the scenes on this project, click here.
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Project: A-Z of Stay-at-Home Sounds
With no events and no tickets to sell when the pandemic hit, I devised an engagement campaign utilising Spotify.
We’d create a new playlist titled from A-Z (ambient techno, big beats, classic hip-hop etc), and share them across our channels every day. The playlists would all live together on a standalone landing page which allowed us to look at the specific metrics and clicks according to tastes and genres.
The aim is to be non-transactional and lighthearted during this downtime. We aren’t pushing marketing or ticketing, and are providing Members with a distraction and a discovery tool. It also shows that we are passionate and knowledgeable about the industry and as such worked in tandem with Pollen Insider.
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Project: Tiers launch
Late 2019 saw the launch of Pollen’s new membership benefits initiative, which would be fronted by a Tiers system.
In practice there was a lot of information to communicate and the key was breaking this down into digestible content. I led on copy across the project and worked closely with members of the Community to help understand user’s needs. I would then communicate this with the Design and Product guys to create the pages above.
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Project: Pollen mobile buying/selling journey
As a multi-layered platform, Pollen has a lot of information, benefits and instructions to relay to its Members. And as the first content hire, much of the mobile app was written by members of the product team (no offence guys!).
While I worked on all areas of our apps, the selling experience was in desperate need of a tidy up. Together with PMs and Product Designers, we rearranged the journey, redesigned pages and revamped content to make the experience, clearer, simpler and easier to make sales.
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Project: Welcome to Pollen onboarding video
Pollen was a pretty complex platform that can be daunting and tricky to get to grips with initially.
We created an introductory video that would be sent to all new Members, and also live within the platform for them to refer to. The video would be a short and sweet intro to Pollen, with a particular push on ‘getting started’ and joining campaigns.
For this project I led on the storyboard and script, working closely with our Community Managers and Motion Designer.
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Joe West Stevens 