Amazon’s Back to School/Off to College campaign is an annual shopping event geared at getting kids and college students across all ages and stages of their education ready to return to classes and or move into college housing. Working under the creative team for North American Stores, I worked on delivering on-site and off-site traffic drivers across multiple channels, each geared at driving customers to get to where they need to find and buy essentials for the upcoming school year. Under this year’s event, the team has elevated our approach in visual storytelling with carefully curated ASINs, scaling up the amount of motion assets produced, and implementing CGI rendered scenes and single product shots to create high resolution product imagery. Within our department, the team scaled our CGI approach to also create motion assets via frame animation that were introduced for the first time and seen on Amazon’s Homepage, the event shopping pages and outbound within Seasonal event emails and push notifications.
Assets seen on this page underwent a thorough internal review process by multiple levels of stakeholders to ensure tenets such as creative quality, verbiage, accuracy of price points and product availability were met. With campaign assets spanning from June through September 2025, the Back to School and Off to College on-site traffic drivers ran alongside summer events such as the 4th of July, Labor Day sale, with some overlap with Halloween during the last weeks of the event, positioned for last-minute school shopping.
Across the event, I was responsible for owning all static Desktop Homepage heroes and Window Display placements for Back to School, a few motion Desktop heroes and Video Player Cards and “below-the-fold” Quad Cards for the Off to College event.
For the Off to College Quad cards, CGI renders were made for a single ASIN product to create accurate representation of specific ASINs from either a topdown or into view, containing realistic lighting and shadows. Saved as transparent images, the ASINs were then scaled and arranged next to the other with flexibility.
In owning the shopping widgets for both the Back the School and Off to College shopping hubs, assets were approached with balancing out the use of color and finding logical instances to sprinkle in motion through product swaps, lighting changes in scenes and easing transitions between one ASIN from another in select visual navigation tiles. Similar to homepage, CGI generated imagery and scenes were introduced for the first time across the event hubs with the goal of building customer trust and improving product discoverability directly across category pages.
Outside of Amazon, Emails and Push notifications were sent out to eligible customers to drive them directly to curated category pages or filtered versions of the page by price or shopping by grade. A combination of CGI, editorial shot and PDP images were leveraged in designing sections of the emails, while Push notification images embraced produced motion GIFs and laydown designs to align with what was being shown on-site.
