A team-built campaign concept for the launch of Nedbank's Youth X — its platform supporting young South Africans with financial tools, opportunities, and lifestyle perks.
This project came out of the IIE Vega Brand Challenge, a high-pressure, agency-style brief simulating a real client relationship. Working as part of student team Oceans 11, the goal was to build a full campaign concept to launch Nedbank's Youth X — a platform supporting young South Africans through financial tools, opportunities, and lifestyle perks.
The brief called for a campaign that could genuinely get young South Africans excited about a banking product, not just inform them of it — all within a one-week sprint.
Key requirements:
Everyone on team Oceans 11 had a specific role; mine was pulling the group's ideas together into one cohesive visual pitch.
Responsible for: visual design and mockup production, translating the team's campaign concept into a consistent set of social media assets.
Tools: Illustrator and Photoshop for layout, type, and image editing across the mockup set.
The mockups needed to feel native to social platforms rather than like a repurposed print ad, so the layouts were built mobile-first, with bold, youth-oriented type and colour pulled from Nedbank's existing brand system.
Consistency across the set mattered more than any single standout piece — the campaign needed to read as one connected launch, not a handful of unrelated posts.
A tag has to read clearly at speed.
Challenge: keeping a banking brand feeling energetic rather than corporate. This was addressed by leaning on lifestyle imagery and youth-facing language over traditional financial-services visuals.
The team delivered a cohesive set of social media mockups for the Youth X launch, pitched live to industry judges as part of the Brand Challenge.
The experience mirrored a real agency workflow end to end — from concept, through execution under a tight deadline, to a final client presentation.
Delivering pitches to industry judges under a real deadline honed my client presentation and feedback integration skills — the kind of pressure that's hard to simulate outside a live brief.
Next time, I'd push for an earlier alignment moment across the team so the visual direction locks in sooner, leaving more time to refine the final assets before the pitch.