Oracle Utilities' Superhero Saga: An Epic Comic Book Adventure
Team:
Visual.ly team in collaboration with the Social Media Director at Oracle Utilities
My Role:
Specialist illustrative designer
Audience:
Nostalgic comic-book style reminiscent of batman and the flash developed to resonate with C-suite decision-makers, software users and utility engineers typically aged around 40-60s.
Following our involvement with over 30 Oracle campaigns, the tech giant’s social media team trusted us to create a series of custom digital assets for Oracle Utilities with carte blanche to develop our own artwork style. The goal was to associate the subsidiary with lighter, more entertaining content in a comic book motif.
Previous collaborations (infographics, ebooks) were based on stats and data insights. This would be our first truly creative piece for Oracle without data studies or analysis behind it, targeting their customers’ emotional core.
The 2d vector-style custom artwork assets we created were received well by Oracle. The cloud became a recurring feature, becoming a top-performing asset and even somewhat inspired the Oracle character style still in use today.
“The comic book helped inspire a hand-crafted theme in Oracle’s Redwood rebrand.” —Oracle Brand Team
Halfway through the project, we found brand alignment to be challenging as emotional traits were difficult to find in Oracle Utilities. Alas, the client’s willingness to plough through helped us to reach an agreement and publish the piece within the two week set deadline.
We agreed with the client on the importance of creating a memorable, unique character that would resonate with the audience, reminiscent of pop culture icons like Batman and the Flash.
With a clear direction in mind, we developed and refined different ideas, focusing on an iconic cover featuring our hero until reaching a final superhero concept; we proceeded to showcase the character in different poses and settings to give the client options. The rest of the project and two subsequent editions flowed smoothly.
The comic series went viral and was featured as their Twitter (now X) cover for six months. It was heavily promoted for three years and became the highest-performing creative digital asset across Oracle Utilities’ social media.
The comic series was launched on the Oracle Utilities website as gated content and was heavily promoted on social media. Thanks to positive success metrics, two editions followed.
By the time the third comic came around, the Oracle Redwood rebrand was underway and we were challenged with integrating the new look into the asset without compromising the integrity of the first two chapters.