Hostinger: The Art of Resilience.

Jun 29

Choosing this month’s #BrandIcon was easy. Having been blown away by our recent conversation with Hostinger’s Head of Creative Production and Brand Communication, Radvilė Jankevičiené, for The Marketing 7 - it just had to be them.

Hostinger, for those of you not in the know, is a global web hosting provider - offering web hosting and building services for businesses, developers, and budding entrepreneurs all over the world. They’re a brand that has seen enormous success over a relatively short period of time; growing from 50 to over 1000 employees in the last 5 years with over 1.2 million clients.

Not bad for five years work, right?

And whilst their growth and success is, of course, something to be marveled at - it’s not the reason we’re writing about them. In fact, it’s their in-house creative and comms teams who’ll be getting all the plaudits here.

To start, Hostinger’s marketing is awesome. And much of the brand’s success can be put down to that alone. But this is less about what we see, and much more about what goes on behind the scenes to ensure that every piece of Hostinger content is exceptional. And that’s the story.

A story of a team’s courage, agility, and resilience.

As Radvilė puts it, her role is “to make the Hostinger brand image sink into customers' minds, and get noticed.” - and that was front of mind for her and her team of 25 creators and communications specialists when it came to ideating and producing the brand's first-ever broadcast ad.

The ad would focus on Hostinger’s leading product feature - its super-fast website loading speed. It made perfect sense, it’s one of the reasons why Google’s Web Vitals rank them as one of the top 5 website hosting platforms in the world.

As for the concept, that was brilliant too. They would compare three website hosting scenarios, using the act of pouring water. A slow-loading website would be illustrated by drips, an unpredictable website by spray, and a Hostinger website by a seamless pour. The produced result was a slick, TV-ready ad, primed for broadcast.

That was until the team decided to can it. Yikes. This is where the story gets good!

Once the ad was complete, the team held an open feedback session and a few things became obvious. The first was time; they needed more time than the 15 seconds dictated by broadcasting - in their minds, this wasn’t enough to truly tell the story they wanted to tell. The second, and most crucial factor, was that the TV audience, where segmentation is limited, was very different from the one they’d been running ads for across socials and other digital media channels.

They realized, out of the hundreds and thousands seeing their ad, that not many would be ready to purchase web hosting right away, and with that in mind, it didn’t really make sense to focus on web loading speeds and something so product-specific. As painful as it was for the production team, they chose to change tack.

They realized they needed something more human, more emotive.

And so they decided to focus on their existing clients, and tell the stories of those already using Hostinger. They reached out to their local clients, who were more than willing to participate, and produced an ad that speaks directly to the hearts of the hustlers and aspiring entrepreneurs who want to take their business online. It’s a different approach for a web hosting provider, but one that we’ve seen executed to great effect by the likes of Monzo, Apple, and Airbnb in recent times - brands that put customers’ stories first.

But this is less about the ad, and more about the bravery of Radvilė’s team and their willingness to adapt and change for the greater good of the brand and the ad, however painful. As Radvilé puts it, “[as a team] we are open to question our choices, and willing to strive for maximum quality.”

If that isn’t a mantra for every aspiring content team, we don’t know what is. Hats off to you Team Hostinger - our #BrandIcon for June ‘22.