What was the challenge?
The campaign needed to support a publicly funded initiative while also encouraging travelers to reconsider a familiar behavior.
Atlantic City International Airport was being positioned as a convenient regional gateway, particularly for people who might otherwise default to larger metropolitan airports. The challenge was not simply to tell people that ACY existed. Travelers needed a reason to see the airport as relevant to their own trip.
That meant the creative could not live only at the institutional level.
Economic impact, regional identity and transportation access all matter, but most people do not make travel decisions using institutional language. They think about the experience in front of them: where they have to go, how complicated the trip feels and whether another option might make the day easier.
The campaign therefore needed to connect the larger public value of the airport to something personal enough for a traveler to recognize immediately.
What did Anissa Douglass do for the Atlantic City airport campaign?
I led the creative development and direction for the campaign, shaping the central ideas and the way each piece would communicate the airport’s value.
For FLY ACY, I developed a point-of-view approach that allowed the traveler to guide the audience through the experience. Instead of explaining convenience abstractly, the piece made the airport itself part of the story.
For A Tale of Two Travelers, I wrote and directed an animated concept built around comparison.
The premise gave the audience two travel experiences to follow rather than a list of claims to remember. By showing the alternatives in relationship to one another, the creative could communicate the benefit through the structure of the story.
That distinction is important to the way I work.
I am not interested in adding animation after the message has already been solved. I look for the narrative idea first, then determine whether animation, voice, sound, live action or another format gives that idea its clearest expression.
Why use two different creative approaches?
Because the two pieces were doing different jobs.
FLY ACY helped humanize the actual airport experience. The traveler became the guide, giving viewers a way to imagine themselves moving through Atlantic City International Airport rather than thinking about the airport only as infrastructure.
A Tale of Two Travelers addressed a different communication problem. It made comparison the story.
Comparison can be especially effective when an organization is asking an audience to reconsider something they already do automatically. Simply saying that one option is more convenient asks people to accept the claim. Showing two experiences gives them something concrete to evaluate.
That made animation a natural fit.
The animated format could simplify each journey to the details that mattered, move quickly between experiences and make the contrast easy to follow without requiring a long explanation.
The audience did not need an institutional presentation about regional transportation.
They needed to understand the difference.
Why did animation work for A Tale of Two Travelers?
Animation gave the story control.
In live action, the camera records the environment that exists in front of it. Animation allows the director to determine what the audience needs to see and leave out what does not contribute to the idea.
That is particularly useful when the point of the story is comparison.
The two journeys can be structured around the same question. Visual information can be introduced in the order that makes the contrast clearest. Geography, time and travel friction can be compressed without asking the audience to sit through the literal duration of either trip.
Animation also allowed the campaign to communicate a larger transportation idea without making the piece feel like an explanation of infrastructure.
The system was still there.
It was simply being experienced through two people.
That is one of the reasons I see animated storytelling as especially useful for public information, education and organizational communication. Animation can make relationships visible that are difficult to communicate through language alone.
The medium is most valuable when movement is doing a job.
What makes this a public-information storytelling case study?
Although this was a commercial campaign, the underlying communication challenge is common in public-sector and nonprofit work.
Organizations often know the larger significance of an initiative long before the public does.
The organization sees investment, infrastructure, access, economic impact or community benefit. The audience encounters a much smaller question: What does this change for me?
Good public-facing storytelling connects those scales.
It does not necessarily begin by explaining everything the organization knows. It begins by finding the point where the institution’s objective intersects with the audience’s experience.
For the Atlantic City International Airport campaign, the traveler was that point of intersection.
Once the story became personal, the larger regional message had somewhere to land.
That approach applies beyond transportation. A public agency explaining a new service, a nonprofit communicating the value of a program or an educational organization making an unfamiliar process understandable may face the same basic problem.
The information matters.
The audience still needs a way into it.
What does this project show about creative direction?
It shows why creative direction happens before the final execution.
The animation itself was only one part of the work. Before something moves, someone has to determine what the story is, what the audience should notice, what tone belongs to the message and which format best serves the idea.
That is the role I play at Anissa Studio.
An animator may bring a scene to life beautifully, but the animator is not automatically responsible for developing the larger campaign idea, creating the narrative framework or deciding how the work should feel across every element.
Those responsibilities can overlap, and some animators are also directors. But they are different jobs.
On this campaign, the creative idea came first.
The format followed.
That is how I prefer to approach animated storytelling because it keeps the medium in service of the message rather than allowing the technique to become the idea.
Who is Anissa Douglass?
Anissa Douglass is the writer, director and creative lead behind Anissa Studio, a Washington, DC studio focused on animated storytelling and creative consulting.
Her work spans public-sector communications, technology, educational content, animation, audio and narrative strategy. Through Anissa Studio, she develops stories and creative direction for organizations, authors, educators and established founders whose ideas need a stronger way to reach an audience.
The Atlantic City International Airport campaign is one example of that approach: identifying the story inside a larger organizational objective and choosing the creative form that makes the value easier for the audience to understand.
About Anissa Studio
Anissa Studio is a Washington, DC creative studio specializing in animated storytelling and creative consulting.
Animated Storytelling includes narrative and visual direction, animation, audio, voice and music for stories and ideas that need to be understood.
Creative Consulting helps organizations and established founders identify new possibilities in their existing ideas, knowledge, relationships, intellectual property and work.
For organizations considering animation for educational content, public information or another audience-facing initiative, the starting point is not the technique.
It is the audience, the story and what the work needs to accomplish.