Reimaging Event Ticket Sales & Marketing
Conferences & events generate a significant portion of revenue for WSJ. When they needed a ground-up redesign of their marketing and sales funnel, they turned to Fueled.
Rebranding and conversion optimization for the entire family of WSJ events
The Ask
Transforming WSJ Live Events
The Wall Street Journal regularly hosts major live events and conferences with top-tier international talent, from newsmaking CEOs to influential celebrities, thought leaders, and intellectuals.
Fueled unified support branding, upgraded the e-commerce/checkout process, and optimized their overall conversion funnel for attendee ticket sales and sponsorship inquiries.
With fifteen separate event brands under the WSJ Live umbrella, we developed an overarching style system that allows each sub-brand to shine while still maintaining a unified look across the family of identities.
Rapid Adaptation
With the biggest names in industries sharing their expertise and stories at these highly anticipated events, WSJ wanted to bring their existing event brands into a more cohesive and user-friendly online experience. The Wall Street Journal’s goal was to gain more attendees, subscribers, and sell more VIP passes for all of their events all while showcase each event with equal weight and bring the spirit of the events alive in the site.
As the global health crisis of 2020 hit, WSJ faced added urgency to accelerate virtual event plans. We expeditiously repurposed assets for a conventional event to work for a digital one with the added challenge of ensuring designs for conventional and virtual editions of events remained visually distinct. We created new design flourishes to better differentiate between in-person and virtual-only events.
Our Approach
After discovering common pain points throughout the family of brands, we were able to create a system of components that could be used as building blocks throughout the websites, each with their own unique branding and logo design applied, allowing them to be differentiated brand to brand. In addition to a set of overlapping, reusable components each brand needed some level of customization addressing their specific needs on a per-event basis while supporting a wide array of mediums, beyond just web and mobile.
We created a compelling display that showcases each individual event and used design to highlight the unique identity of each event. We worked closely with the Wall Street Journal team through web development, including special attention to conversion flow across discovery and ticket purchasing.
Digital Festival Development
Another feature benefiting from a fresh look was the festival agenda. Spanning three days and multiple stages the agenda needed to be informative but also user intuitive. We redesigned this feature to allow for a quick switching of days and mobile friendly format with handy filters that help users hone in on the talks that are important to them.
Being the face of the website, the homepage also needed to reflect the spirit of the in-person festival while making clear that the virtual series was now taking the spotlight.
Women In Series
The WSJ hosts a series of events centered around women. We brought a refreshed identity to the entire series. A particular challenge was differentiating the identities between the parent category of the “Women In” and the individual events, like the “Women in the Workplace” event.
Visit the Women In Series Website
Event Branding
Using bold shapes and colors we created a dynamic feeling website that echoed the diverse and pioneering spirit of the Women In Series.
Women In used the same hierarchical components of WSJ Live in terms of the way events are displayed.
Tech Live
WSJ Tech Live focuses on exploring the latest tech headlines with industry leaders from Tim Cook (Apple CEO) to Kevin Systrom (Instagram co-founder). We leveraged highly esteemed speakers to reflect the prestige and caliber of the Tech Live event.
Visit Tech Live Website
Virtual Event Development
Tech Live faced the same challenges as all brands, how to move forward with virtual event offerings while still keeping the spirit and excitement of their main event. We addressed this with an “Event Series” umbrella to house all events while clearly identifying which events were available to Watch Live and stream. After hearing user feedback, we also created a “Register” sub-menu that allows users to register for any upcoming sub-event, rather than just register for the main festival.
Dynamic Pages
The types of traffic visiting the WSJ Live homepage varies greatly depending on seasonality and proximity to various flagship events. We designed a highly adaptable homepage that can be configured in numbers ways and fluidly adapts to the current event landscape.
Multiple states were also needed for the event pages themselves, accounting for imminent events, far-away events, currently happening events, and just-passed events. Each of these states require unique designs, copy, and calls to action.
