Uber Year in Review 2018

To create the Uber Year in Review 2018, the Creative, Data Science and CRM teams came together to develop a series of special emails, having a simple question as a starting point: “Who were you at Uber in 2018?”. The answer came after a creative deep dive inside Uber users data, that were transformed into 10 different characters created especially for the Year in Review.

From Data to Personas

Before the creation of the characters, we had to take a deep dive into the user's data with a different perspective to bring art and science together in a creative way. Considering the possible situations of use cases, for both Riders and Drivers, we tried to figure out and understand how big they were and if they were large enough to cover a great part of our users base. Beyond that, they had to be interesting to be transformed into characters. After a long brainstorm of possibilities and ran a lot of queries, we were able to create the first Personas.

Characters Creation

To make the persona work with anyone who receives our email, regardless of their gender, we took care and the challenge of creating names that work for everyone. To bring the characters into life, we seek the talented illustrator Leo Natusme and we convey to him the challenge of creating characters that were ludic, fun and didn’t have a clear gender identification.

The Emails

What might look like as just a simple email was actually a very complex project due to the targeting complexity, cohorts creation, email triggers, and others challenges, considering that it was made for a base of millions of users. Beyond the characters, that came in the emails alongside a personalised copy for each one of the 10 different ones, they also had curiosities about the user’s 2018, for both Riders and Drivers, with pieces of information like the number of compliments received and the year season that they ride the most. It was 4 different blocs of Infos, that appears in a modular way according to which character they were.

Social Network Repercussion

The emails had a great repercussion on social network, in which people made posts sharing and talking about them.