Storytelling as growth.
Where I learned storytelling, and turned it into growth. I helped launch the UK from zero, ran the brand’s presence at the country’s biggest festivals, then built the first-person storytelling system that carried one brand across 22 markets, at a €5 CAC.
BlaBlaCar was growing fast across 22 markets, each telling its own story. I saw a way to align them behind one, told first-person by the people actually in the car.
One story, 22 markets.
New markets, new teams, and a brand story every market was writing for itself, in its own way.
That was the opportunity. One story, told consistently and in the fans’ own voice, would travel further than 22 separate ones. And in the UK, a whole market was there to be built from scratch, with growth that cost less than throwing money at ads.
Making carpooling part of the culture.
I joined in 2013 on the four-person team that launched the UK market. Carpooling with strangers was not yet a normal thing to do here, so the job was cultural before it was commercial.
BlaBlaCar became Live Nation’s first ever Official Ridesharing Partner, across Latitude, Leeds and Reading. I handled the on-site presence and the communications around it, end to end: a team of 20 across the three festivals, 300-space priority-parking zones, the BlaBla Tents, a photobooth built into a functioning Mini, and a live ride board that paired 150+ post-its.
Aggregate footprint: 2,200+ rides offered, 530+ cars in our priority lots, 3,000+ branded backpacks in attendees’ hands.
50%+
of priority-parking users said they wouldn’t have rideshared without the partnership. The activation changed how people behaved.
Real moments, not perfect gram.
In 2016 I moved to the central Brand and Design team as Global Brand Content Manager. There I rebuilt how BlaBlaCar told its story: first-person, shot on a phone, real carpool moments (laughing, singing, the view out the window) instead of polished “perfect gram” ads.
This wasn’t a tested, optimised strategy. I had a gut feeling that real moments would land harder than polished ads, so I made them, organically, first. People connected with them. When paid did come, that same creative is what brought acquisition down to a €5 CAC.
BlaBlaCar is all about stories. Every shared ride is a human connection, so I built the brand to sound like one.
€5
cost per acquisition — a quarterly average across 22 markets, at 3% CTR and 2M impressions. Paid acquisition built on storytelling creative.
One brand, 22 markets.
I rolled one consistent brand across all 22 markets, and rebuilt the internal design process behind it: a full review and restructure that cut ad-hoc requests to the design team by 90%, while holding the KPIs. One brand, recognisable everywhere, run by a system the local teams could keep up themselves.
The capstone came in 2017, one of the last things I worked on there: BlaBlaCar’s global rebrand with Kyoto agency, where I led the creative content.
Storytelling is growth.
Honestly, this is where I got the space to be creative: to work out how to talk to people like humans, not like a brand. And it worked. People connected with it, and that connection grew the business.
Three repeatable principlesStorytelling makes paid work harder.
Real moments as the creative meant paid acquisition landed harder with people, which is what took acquisition to a €5 CAC.
First person beats polish.
Real carpool moments shot on a phone outperformed the perfect gram. People believe the person in the passenger seat, not the ad.
One brand, run locally.
A system let 22 markets tell the same story in their own voice, without a flood of ad-hoc requests back to the centre.