Global head of brand and creative Andre Le Masurier has led an overhaul of the brand from within, clarifying its identity and adopting a new global campaign strategy while drawing on the influence of creators.
Skyscanner
When Le Masurier started at Skyscanner in 2021, “there wasn’t a ton of belief in brand and brand investment and the team was mainly production oriented,” he says.
Today, a blended in-house creative sub-team consists of around 12 designers, four writers and three motion designers who work together and Le Masurier is building further capability in strategic and conceptually focused creatives so it has “less reliance on external advertising agencies”, he says. Le Masurier oversees brand, creative and marcomms, which, combined, is a broader team of around 50 people.
Mainly operating out of London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Barcelona, the team is focused on anything from campaign to design work.
Central to his work today is “trying to figure out where to get the most effectiveness, efficiency and return on investment as a brand,” says Le Masurier.
Spending on above-the-line has been “super effective” for the company, he says. “So we’re now trying to understand through the lens of owned and earned social and PR what levers we can use in above the line and what the right mix looks like for us as a business.”
Advertisement
Skyscanner has had a lot of successes partnering with creators working in the travel space through social. “We work with ambassadors globally and you get real value while creating human, authentic, word-of-mouth, while capturing culture and local nuance.” Although this is working very well for the brand, he says: “We need to make sure the social strategy ladders back up to the brand strategy.”
The brand strategy is the biggest continued investment for Skyscanner and Le Masurier says: “Codifying the look, the tone of voice and execution globally across the business is something we’re focused on while raising the bar on the craft and execution of the brand.”
Skyscanner’s identity was overhauled by Koto back in 2019 and, although “there were aspects that were really good and the coding was great,” according to Le Masurier: “We’ve gone through the brand guidelines from front to back to keep them up-to-date.”
This has resulted in changes being made to the broader identity system, although not the logo. “We minimized it and rebuilt it from the ground up, but kept some parts.” The main reason being “large parts of it were sat in the drive and we weren’t using them and when we were they weren’t being used that well.”
A Larken font has been introduced to “differentiate ourselves,” while the color system has been reduced, “leaning into the sky blue” as its main color, Le Masurier says.
Meanwhile, a series of templates have been created that are “actionable and easy to use in Figma by other parts of the business outside of the in-house team,” particularly “so things don’t get misused,” he adds.
Advertisement
The broad creative, design and brand responsibility that Le Masurier’s role encompasses is reflective of his career, which has seen him work for agencies including Maclaren McCann in Canada and then in the US, AKQA, Saatchi & Saatchi, 72andSunny in creative director and group creative director roles, as well as a VP and ECD role at R/GA in London. He was also ECD at Google’s Brand Studio in London.
Ultimately, Le Masurier feels he’s been able to steer the strategic and creative direction of the brand because of support from Skyscanner’s CMO Clive Peoples and CEO John Mangelaars.
“Being close to the center of truth is the most rewarding and powerful thing, while understanding what the business needs day by day. You ask yourself how you, as a design and creative brand team, can execute a vision that’s been created by the execs and approved by the board.”
Consequently, these days, when agencies are needed, he says: “We go after micro or boutique agencies. Most of our money there is going towards conceptual, ideation, strategy and some execution of the creative… the actual execution of the campaigns.” He clarifies that “80-90% of the work is still happening in-house.”
Advertisement