What it was

SberZvuk is one of the biggest music-streaming apps in Russia — basically their Spotify. I led its brand and creative, and later ran it as CMO, then CPO.

What I did

I ran co-branded campaigns with big consumer brands — KitKat, YSL, Budweiser, Lay's. Not "here's our logo together," but real campaigns where the goal was to turn viewers into paying music subscribers.

The result

The KitKat campaign got ~20% of people who saw it to click — about 40× a normal online ad (most ads get under 0.5%). It brought in ~1,000 new paying subscribers, and here's the kicker: KitKat paid us to run it. So a brand paid me to go get them customers — and we kept the customers. YSL and Budweiser campaigns converted at 7–8% (a good landing page usually converts 2–3%).

Why it matters

Most creative directors are a cost. I turned brand work into a channel that made money. I started SberZvuk's brand-partnership work and the Studio (next case), ran the company as CMO then CPO, and kept designing their strategy decks after I left in 2020. So I've watched things I started grow into the company's biggest bets: the partnership network grew ~8×, the audience grew from 4.9M to 15.5M, and the company climbed from #5–6 to top-3 in its market.