Role
Brand Designer & Art Director
Deliverables
Campaign, CRM, landing pages, paid, social, OOH, brand film
Impact
€20M+ campaign revenu
citizenM is a global hotel brand built on a strong visual identity and irreverent tone of voice. As their in-house creative, I was responsible for translating that identity into every digital surface — from the CRM system reaching millions of subscribers to paid campaigns across Meta, Google, and programmatic channels.
I didn't just execute — I shaped. I built and maintained the brand design system in Figma, established scalable templates for the marketing team, and directed a short brand film end-to-end. I also led the in-house content team, producing photography and short-form video that replaced external agency work and saved the company €50K+ annually.
The brief
citizenM is a brand that champions good sleep. Every summer they run a sale — but 2024 was different. With the Paris Olympics approaching, the brief was to leverage a genuine cultural moment and connect it to a rising trend: sleep tourism. The objective was to prove that citizenM is best in class when it comes to sleeping away from home, using the Olympics as the hook.
This was a PR-led campaign, which meant the creative direction had to do two things at once: work alongside the science (a research paper on sleep and athletic recovery) and still feel unmistakably citizenM — playful, bold, and never self-serious.
The approach
The creative concept merged the language of sport with citizenM's irreverent tone. Instead of borrowing Olympic imagery literally, we built a visual world where sleep was the sport — where rest was competitive, recovery was the medal, and citizenM was the training ground.
I designed the campaign across every touchpoint: CRM emails reaching millions of subscribers, landing pages, paid ads across Meta and Google, social content, and out-of-home placements. The visual system needed to flex across all of these while maintaining a single creative thread.
Bonus Piece: The brand film
As part of the campaign, I directed a short brand film to accompany the sleep research paper. The film needed to bridge two registers: the credibility of the science and the warmth of the citizenM brand. It was built for YouTube, designed mobile-first but with enough visual storytelling to sustain a longer watch.
I led the project end-to-end — concept, scripting, art direction on set, and post-production oversight. The result was a piece that gave the research narrative an emotional entry point, making the science feel human and the brand feel authoritative.
Outcome
The Summer Sale '24 campaign became citizenM's most successful commercial campaign, generating over €20M in revenue. The creative proved that a brand-led, culturally-timed approach to a sale could outperform pure promotional messaging — and that the in-house team could deliver at the scale and quality of an external agency.
+31629327875
[email protected]
Papaverhof 59,
1032 LX Amsterdam
+31629327875
[email protected]
Papaverhof 59,
1032 LX Amsterdam