Alex Spott

We're all desperate to live in fantasies – for some of us (me) that means being addicted to faerie smut and for others that means cosplaying as your favorite pop-culture characters. To those of you who relate to the latter I say read some smut and change your life, but also Airbnb that has created a new category for you – Icons.

In 2024, Airbnb launched their newest category Icons which lets you step into worlds you’ve only ever dreamed of. It's a category of extraordinary stays and experiences hosted by the greatest names in music, film, television, art, sports, and more.

After the initial launch, my partner and I were brought on to oversee the creative for Icons across social. The team had never had creative directors, so we helped shape the team and put in a plan of action while managing an agency and working with multiple partners internally and externally on multiple social assets. It's giving start-up vibes in a way that's chaotic and truly blissful.

If you have a house, you have an Airbnb.

And while more people are open to hosting than ever some are still hesitant to try. Most people think it's too complicated or just don't know where to start so we created tiny worlds to show them just how simple it actually is.

When I heard Instagram had a partnership with Netflix’s second season of “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, I prayed to the Dark Lord and was chosen as the little witch that got to create content for it.

To encourage teens who watch the show to create their own story content with our camera tools, we created DIY spells featuring the cast of Sabrina (!!!!!). Our supernatural all female team (director, editor, graphics, set design, and AD) completed our creative coven and helped make some of my favorite content to date.

Hail Satan.

Music is universally core to self-expression and an easy way connect with friends on a deeper level which obviously makes it a key part of Instagram.

As someone who had an iconic solo in The Music Man Junior (among other musicals), I’ve been *~honored~* to help launch these into the world.

Lyrics in Stories

Remember when you were emo in high school but didn’t know how to express yourself so My Chemical Romance lyrics did it perfectly? Well now you can share how you feel without saying anything at all using “lyrics in Stories”. To launch this, we partnered with iconic musicians in specific markets – Billie Eilish (US, UK, CA), Lena (Germany), and Aya Nakamura (France, not in film) .

Music Question Sticker & Effects

Ask questions and get answers back in the form of a song AND add effects that react to the track you’re playing.

Directed by Alex Spott (me)

Music In Stories

You can now add music to your stories which means you can literally add a soundtrack to anything.

Directed by Alex Spott (me)

During Pride, Instagram partnered with The Trevor Project to create an LGBTQ+ teen safety guide.

The guide gives teens the tools they need to ensure their time on Instagram is healthy, supportive, and empowering. It’s such an important document, we needed to make sure teens would actually use it, so we partnered with the badass artist, Ashley Lukashevsky to bring the guide to life in a more visual way.

Find it here.

WOT R U WEARING?

As a peasant, you never have to ask this question again. As an influencer, you never have to answer this question again. Thanks to the launch of Shop From Creators, an IG feature that allows you to shop directly from creators looks/products, it’s a win for everyone.

To launch the feature, we partnered with brands and creators (Hannah Bronfman, Ellen V Lora, and Alissa Ashley) showing the magic of the product in a film for the finale of F8 (Facebook’s annual conference streamed around the world) and a New! Story on Instagram.

In 2018 Instagram launched Shopping on the platform, but not many people were aware of the variety of brands they could shop from. So naturally they asked me, someone who can’t shop so she makes her friends shop for her, to help them out.

Gift guides are an editorial holiday tradition, but they’re pretty generic and might we even say – sexist, so how do we help Instagram shoppers find the right items for gift giving? By tapping into our community and bringing together 6 popular hashtags with 34 gift-worthy brands creating holiday gift guides in a way only Instagram can.

They live here.

To launch the campaign, #InstaGiftGuide aired on Good Morning America with IG’s Head of Fashion Partnerships, Eva Chen.

Most importantly, it was the gift that kept on giving. We joined forced with a local non-profit organization, Bottomless Closet, that helps disadvantage women get back into the workforce, donating all of our products to them.

TWO HOUSEHOLDS, BOTH ALIKE IN DIGNITY,

With fair teens, their fate lies.

Video chat – low pressure and private (which is why teens love it)

Instagram – perceived as high pressure and public (which is why teens love it).

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers come to life;
A campaign so good it overthrows
Doth with their birth end their cultural strife.

YES, THIS CAMPAIGN WAS AS SUCCESSFUL AS SHAKESPEARE. It set new records for sustained adoption: Adoption amongst “slow adopters” doubled and sustained over 6+ weeks – the longest of any Instagram ad campaign EVER.

Directed by Me and Nick Jasenovec

When teens are bored (read: a lot) posting on Instagram Stories with features like stickers and polls is a quick and easy way for them to interact with friends. But Instagram has picked up an m.o. for perfection so we needed to find a way to show (and encourage) teens they can share fun and weird things in the moment.

We tapped into crushes – a huge part of being a teen– and re-defined what a crush means. For example, teens crush hard on new sneakers and I crush hard on Flamin’ Hots (but like actually send me some pls).

Directed by me, Alex Spott. (This was sooo fun to make.)

To launch the new Spotify partnership with Instagram, which allowed you to share what you’re listening to directly from Spotify to your Instagram Story, we tapped into a behavior that teens were already doing – creating messages with playlists.

We told stories with songs the same way teens do through Instagram house ads and on Spotify ads (listen here) showing teens a new way they can easily express themselves with two of their favorite apps.

Conspiracies that are actually real:

Aliens helped build the pyramids

Avril Lavigne is dead and Melissa is her living body double

Conspiracies that are not real:

Instagram hides feed posts from you

In 2018 people were mad because Instagram ditched showing you your feed in chronological order. But change is good, especially in this case, because it stops you from missing posts from the accounts you care about and shows you things you love the most first.

So, we used the acronym F.E.E.D to debunk this conspiracy theory and found the coolest teens (do teens just not go through awkward periods anymore??) to give us the lowdown on how feed works. (Check it out on the help center here.)

Directed by: Columbine Goldsmith
D.P: Kelly Jeffrey

Illustrator: Parallel Teeth

Rockets of Awesome designs and hand-picks wardrobes for kids based on what they like and don't like and sends them out for free! While they want to make parents' lives easier, they needed someone to make their lives easier by creating a voice for the brand, and I was the chosen one. (But not in a creepy "I am Jesus" or Toy Story aliens meet Buzz Lightyear chosen one way.)

Creative Direction by the incredibly awesome Theresa Canning Zast

WHY IS THIS ON MY NEWS FEED?!

Well, you kind of put it there because when you interact with your News Feed you help shape it. If you didn't know that you're in luck because we created fun little tutorial loops to teach you how to Make your News Feed more you.

SAY GOODBYE TO CLICHÉS LIKE PUPPY LOVE AND SWEETS because we gave this sugarcoated holiday an upgrade by tapping into what modern teen girls are actually passionate about: bringing the world closer together through love. And no we didn't just make this up, we chatted with real life teen girls and created an animated film using their VO. The film invited girls everywhere to refresh Valentine's Day by sending a message of love and unity to the world accompanied by a unique digital heart that they code and share using #CodedWithLove.

Happy Valentine's Day Y'all! Xoxo

Create your own here!

+A bunch of inspiring women & Zac Posen shared the love too.

+Became the 2nd most watch video on MWC.

+Garnered more site visitors than any other 2015 MWC project.

Made with Code aims to inspire girls to learn code by pairing the things they're passionate about with technology. So we partnered with the year's top animated film, Pixar's Inside Out, and invited girls on a coding adventure with Riley and her emotions.

Play it here.

(I helped create the game storyline.)

No matter if you pronounce GIF: GIPH or JIFF, we all love them and they're truly for everyone — a universal language. (It's totally GIPH.) So when Google wanted to create a campaign for their first dual device that's made "For Everyone", we already knew what to do.

JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU'VE ACCOMPLISHED SOMETHING IN YOUR LIFE, a 17-year-old Russian hacks Target's system.

Between that (in 2013) and having problems with brand recognizability, Target needed to make a strong comeback.

So, we did just that by creating an iconic campaign that was uniquely and unmistakably Target, collaborating with Diane Martel to create our kid-like world and Karen O. to re-imagine the classic Christmas song, "Marshmallow World".

Target said we hit their "marketing trifecta" (traffic, engagement, and brand love) and Jeff Jones (CMO) said "Alice changed our history", making this campaign an overall success!

+National Retail Federation: Holiday Campaign of the Year

+Generated 2x the social conversation compared to the 2013 campaign.

+Resulted in a 40% increase in sales on Thanksgiving Day, the biggest online sales day in Target history.

+"We've had some great creative for the holiday season. I'm getting e-mails everyday from friends...saying, 'That is some of the best creative, best advertising, we've seen from Target in years.'" Brian Cornell, Target CEO

When it comes to going back-to-school, every little thing is a really big deal. SERIOUSLY. Nowadays, kids are tiny curators of their back-to-school personas and while moms love it, they don't want to break the bank.

We kicked off the campaign with Target's Buy One Give One initiative. For each supply bought in July, Target gave another to the Kids In Need Foundation. They ended up donating $25 million in supplies, impacting 2 million students. (And that's a really big deal.)

+Check out a few of the radio spots here.

+#1 in Adage's Top 10 2014 Back-to-School Ads

You know what I love more than disposable utensils, water bottles, soda cans, or wasting paper? EARTH. NATURE. ANIMALS. LIFE.

At 72andSunny, I started an anti-plastic bottle and soda can initiative and all my complaining about how we're ruining the world actually worked!

72 started a Green Team and installed a water machine so we never had to order bottles or cans again! I was lucky enough to create the posters to announce this initiatve.

Most kids don't get shipped off to summer camp by their single parent only to find out that their arch nemesis at camp is actually their identical twin, so they switch places and once their parents figure out they have the wrong twin, they switch them back only to realize they're in love again and they both happen to be rich so sometimes they live in London and other times in Wine Country.

In fact, most kids hang out with mom all summer, meaning she needs to have a lot planned to keep them as busy as the kids above. Luckily, we had a plan to help mom take her summer to the next level and make it the best ever.

+Effie Awards 2014 Retail Bronze Winner

+"Best Use of Vine" 2013 Mashie Runner Up

+Adweek's top summer ads of 2013

+OPRAH ♥s us.

People can barely contain themselves when it comes to holiday sales...I mean, they literally leave Thanksgiving dinner to go to Black Friday. What?! Why? Eating trumps everything.

But, no matter the infinite amount of questions we may have had, we embraced the new holiday traditions of the sales obsessed and created super catchy carols for them sung by their own personal greek choir, THE DEALS DUET.

Directed by Mr. Jorma Taccone

+On Mashable's 12 Most Memorable Marketing Campaigns of 2012.

Once upon a time, before I got tricked into becoming a writer, I was a publicist. One of the brands I launched in the U.S was Japanese raw denim line, Guerilla 24. 

To introduce the brand and what it stands for, we created a web-series (that died after I left, RIP) where we shared artists' stories who fit the Guerilla lifestyle.

Our first artist was Insurgency Inc., a collective based in LA.