THE CHALLENGE

Live Happy isn't just a new national magazine — it's a lifestyle brand dedicated to the science of being happy. In developing this new brand, we took a year to seek out brand awareness across several different channels, including social media, mobile, web, merchandise, and finally our podcast, which reached 100,000 downloads in its first month.

Social media presence

It was important for us to stay in the public's eye every day, and so we shared inspirational quote tiles across several different social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Our Facebook page had about 900+ new likes a week, and several of these specific images had a reach number above 22,000, with shares ranging from 88 to 200+ at our most active times of day.

CAMPAIGN: #HAPPY ACTS

What’s a Happy Act? Something that makes someone else smile. It’s a small gesture, like buying a stranger a cup of coffee, letting someone merge on the highway, telling a coworker what a great job they’re doing — tiny acts that ripple into a much larger effect. In February 2015 I began work on HappyActs.org, a website where people around the world could make a pledge to do a Happy Act, then hashtag it to spread the joy across social media and encourage everyone to join in. We initially used it as a participation contest to kick off an annual event, but since then decided it was worth spreading happiness all year. Our email list is over 50,000 strong and even in off-contest season we get about 40 emails sign ups a week.

The campaign included use of web, mobile and social media as well as traditional media like CTA “calling cards” that encouraged people to do happy acts and share them in person.

Mobile app, which generated ideas for Happy Acts, and encouraged users to share across social networks.

Examples: Happy Acts

These are some examples of Happy Acts suggestions that were generated by the mobile app. Users were encouraged to share the tile across their social media platform of choice, and then once they did it, to share it once again with us using the hashtag #HappyActs. We had an active tagboard on the website that showed Happy Acts people were doing in real time.

CTA cards, which were passed out at events and that people could buy that encouraged people do to a Happy Act, and then share it and spread the message.

Podcast: Live Happy Now

Happiness on the go! I designed the app and store assets as well as the branding, marketing and promotional materials for our first podcast. We launched the same night as The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and won the race to #1 in the New and Noteworthy category! We had over 100,000 downloads our first month.

We used email, web site hero banners and a dedicated podcast tab, social media graphics on Pinterest and Facebook ads, as well as old-fashioned word of mouth to fuel the downloads.

The race to #1 in progress. We hit it about 2 weeks later, but this was my favorite part! — **The race to #1 in progress.** We hit it about 2 weeks later, but this was my favorite part!

Below: Supplemental graphics that were used on the web site to promote episodes of the podcast. The graphics without titles were reshaped to use as Facebook ads to meet the 20% rule.

Below: Gallery of ads and headers for Instagram, Twitter and the website for the podcast. One is an ad that nods back to the magazine from the podcast, to encourage cross-sales.

Email marketing

I created several email campaigns for promotions and sales within our online store.

Coordinating social media Ads

Product Design

I designed a few products for the brand, including a tin that outlined a "Recipe for Happiness," and a chalkboard wall decal. Both are for sale at store.livehappy.com/gifts.

Supplemental Websites

In order to help our brand reach in Latin America to support new offices in Mexico, we launched a Spanish-language version of the web site, which I designed assets for and maintained.

Launch live site

In efforts to help advertisers and advertising sales executives understand our brand, we created our media kit website, which talks about the magazine's demographic and the brand's features in greater detail, and includes downloads of the demographic research.