2016 Winners
2016 In-House Agency of the Year
Hilton Worldwide
[D³] Digital Design + Development is Hilton Worldwide’s internal digital creative agency. With offices in Dallas, Glasgow, Memphis, and LA, the 60-person team includes designers, developers, user-experience architects, copywriters, research and optimization specialists, and client service managers.
[D³] provides digital creative support to Hilton’s brands and corporate divisions, through website and app design, content strategy, and creative consultancy. Their focus is to dream, delight and deliver, through innovation and cross-pollination, industry-leading best practices, and a holistic, Hilton-wide digital identity.
Annually, the in-house agency spends over 9,500 hours enhancing and improving 135+ sites including 14 foreign-language sites that allow guests to book Hilton hotels anywhere in the world.
They also create great-looking, revenue-generating sites with designers that are as passionate about usability as they are accessibility. The team’s UX architects specialize in taking complex, wide-ranging content and functionality and arranging it in a coherent, accessible structure—which their developers create fast, responsive sites and apps using the latest CSS, JavaScript, and HTML5 techniques.
[D³]’s optimization team conducts multivariate tests, surveys and qualitative research. With this invaluable empirical data, they further optimize usability and accessibility, and maximize revenue. Their writers help convert traffic into sales, with original, user-focused content that enhances corporate websites, email campaigns, landing pages, and blogs.
What ultimately defines [D³], however, is its working culture—founded on honesty, humility, reliability and resourcefulness, they give credit, share ideas and strive for creative solutions. With every celebrated success, there is a focus on continuous improvement of the team, its work, and the larger Hilton Worldwide organization.
Finalists
Bank of America
Enterprise Creative Solutions (ECS) is the go-to creative agency for everything from independent demand generation to multi-channel integrated campaigns, executing 19,000 projects per year in support of eight distinctly different lines of business across Bank of America. The internal agency drives strong results and delivers millions in saving to the company, all while working hand-in-hand with a sizable roster of external agencies.
In 2015, ECS made a strategic decision to expand its capabilities in social, email, and asset management. For social, that meant leveraging its content and design expertise in the highly nuanced space of Global Banking and Markets—completing over 59 multi-asset campaigns by year-end. It also meant flipping its email-development model to mobile first, so ECS could become a resource for all lines of business on everything from servicing communications to sales support and thought leadership.
Lastly, ECS took on the management and fulfillment of the bank’s 600K+ owned images, which, when added to the existing scope of assets, enabled the team to become a digital media and asset management powerhouse.
Globoforce
Pint-sized yet powerful, Globoforce’s Creative Team is comprised of eight not-so-ordinary humans. These extraordinary people are part of a prideful, passionate, close-knit team that does more than pump out creative genius. They have also helped create a movement to “make work more human,” impacting many outside of their company walls.
Diverse in talent, background and experience, team Globoforce is united in a design-led strategy that drives innovation, adoption, and ultimately results. Their capabilities range from graphics, multimedia, and product design to specialized positions such as human experience, interaction, video production, usability, color and trend design, and in-house prototyping.
Through collaboration and idea generation, the group has the right structure and strategy in place to leverage design and innovation as a competitive advantage. It takes a focused team working in sync to deliver products and brand experiences in a way that differentiates the business and delights consumers. The internal agency at Globoforce proves that success comes from big ideas, not big teams.
