Five days of filming, 60+ crew members, 14 actors, 40 extras, and one Miro board. At Miro, we don’t just eat our own dogfood – we use our product to run our entire company. So, when we set out to create our first national ad campaign this year, it was only natural that we turned to our platform to get the job done.
We partnered with Portland-based agency Öpınıonated to launch a multi-channel campaign spanning TV, print, and digital ads across the United States. The concept? To showcase how Miro can help companies of all sizes solve “monster” problems.
Here’s how we tackled this monster task using Miro.
Finding the right agency can be hard, and onboarding and aligning quickly can be even harder. Since we had a short runway for the Miro ad campaign (we wanted to launch in under six months!), we knew we had to get on the same page with our agency partner as quickly as possible – and we prioritized this from the start.
“Miro was instrumental in us bringing Öpinionated on board,” says our Head of Brand, Jelena Veselinovic. Our team had already completed a lot of preliminary work, and we used a Miro board to help get the agency up to speed and ready to jump in. “We needed to connect them to everything we had done, while also keeping them focused on what we wanted to create in the future,” Jelena explains.
Using frames and shapes, the Miro board served as a visual brief for the Öpinionated team. It provided a user-friendly, holistic way to share our goals and vision for the campaign, flag potential challenges, and outline who Miro is as a company. What’s more, it showcased how we walk the walk, using Miro to create and collaborate on our own work across global teams.
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Before meeting with the agency, our team worked to develop a clear strategy for this project, and Miro provided a vehicle to share that visually instead of leaving it open to interpretation.
“Miro gave us the ability to seamlessly navigate through different chapters of the story – to see the big picture and zoom into the smallest details,” Jelena says.
Next, it was time to bring our strategy to life. Thanks to our Miro board, Öpinionated had the information and resources they needed to begin concepting potential directions for the ad campaign – and we continued to use the board throughout this creative stage of the project.
“One of the things we agreed to early on was using Miro for all communications. Embracing the tool was critical for the entire process,” notes Cameron Soane, Associate Creative Director at Öpinionated.
People learn by doing, so it’s no surprise that the Öpinionated team quickly picked up and adopted Miro – despite being new to the product. “You don’t need a lot of prerequisite knowledge to use Miro,” says Scott Fish, Associate Creative Director at Öpinionated. What’s more, he finds that Miro’s user-centered design encourages different approaches depending on the people and project: “[It has] a ton of templates, tools, and ways to enable collaborative thinking, but you can also just freestyle.”
Because Miro boards enable ongoing communication and collaboration, the project team was also better prepared to create feedback loops and align continuously across multiple time zones.
How Miro was a game changer
Helped establish alignment with and onboard a new agency
Enabled quick work turnaround in a short window of time
Aligned teams on the brief, concept, and strategy, despite being distributed across seven time zones
Creating an environment for free-flowing creativity
When it was time to start concepting and collaborating on ideas for the ad campaign, Miro served as the homebase. We used everything from frames, shapes, sketching, images, and videos to help the team ideate, share, and iterate.
Working together on the Miro board helped build trust between agency and client. It encouraged radical transparency and set the tone for an environment of “live” collaboration knowing things didn’t have to be perfect and could easily be changed.
“The key ingredient for powerful collaboration is trust, and trust takes time,” says Jelena. “But time is the commodity that people in business don’t have, so we needed to overcome that through the vulnerability and radical transparency that Miro provides.”
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We used to put ideas together in Google Docs, which are pretty linear and not great for sharing images. Using Miro for the concepting phase let us share a brain and this accelerated the pace at which we could share ideas.
Scott Fish, Associate Creative Director at Öpinionated
For Öpinionated, it was unusual to share these “script sketches” and rough pitches, rather than more polished final versions. But these unfinished products became an important part of the creative process, and sharing them helped create openness, vulnerability, and new opportunities for feedback in the judgment-free space of the Miro board. In fact, sometimes it was unclear where Öpinionated’s ideas ended and Miro’s began, creating a feeling of one unified team. Lines were blurred, things grew and evolved in a single shared space, and the work progressed faster.
Both teams used Miro to combine words, ideas, and images into something greater than the sum of their parts. “I’m throwing in a bunch of words, he’s throwing in a bunch of pictures, and we’re like ‘wow, this is beautiful music,’” says Scott.
How Miro changed the game:
Enabled creativity once reserved for face-to-face sessions
Created a shared space where ideas could take root, change, and grow
Provided a visual platform for complex ideas that weren’t necessarily linear
Looking to the future: Establishing a new standard for agency engagement
Communication is the bedrock of strong relationships, and creative collaborations are no exception. Throughout this ad campaign development, we used Miro to communicate seamlessly with our partners at Öpınıonated – and the board was a game-changer.
“When you’re doing asynchronous work with partners in different time zones, there’s a lot of ‘leaving cookies out for Santa,’ where we’d wake up and see what happened with our notes from the night before,” explains Scott. “You have to over-communicate, so Miro is a great tool for that; just being able to be very explicit with texts and visuals.”
He points out that the board itself empowers users to think in terms of endless possibilities: “When we were working in the unlimited space of a Miro board, it gave us the space to wax poetic about our ideas and over-explain things.”
Although Öpınıonated relied previously on Google Docs to tackle similar collaborative, creative projects, Scott believes Miro made the process much more intuitive. Cameron agrees, saying that Miro enabled the group to work “organically” in ways that other tools can’t.
And the results speak for themselves. Not only did both teams feel energized and excited about the project, but the work paid off – and highlights the power of Miro boards to take collaboration and creativity to new levels.
”Miro helps us go beyond the semantics, beyond the words, and really connect,” explains Jelena. “When we can be vulnerable and practice deep empathy, we can better align and do our best work.”
