Case study: How LIONS scaled email production across 10 brands with Stripo

When it comes to email creation in large teams, production goes beyond copywriting and design. For many marketing teams with campaigns involving multiple stakeholders, the real challenge is ensuring speed, consistency, and flexibility in the production process. When workflows depend on rigid templates or external support, even minor changes can slow down teams and limit creativity. This becomes particularly challenging when emails play a central role in large, high-profile campaigns where timing, branding, and accuracy are crucial.

In this case study, you’ll discover how LIONS, the organization behind the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, transformed its email production process with Stripo. You’ll see how the team moved from restrictive workflows to a flexible, collaborative approach that enabled multiple teams to build emails independently, onboarded 10 brands and 33 users in less than 2 years, and improved consistency and engagement across campaigns.

Expert

Olly Browning

Head of Digital Creative at LIONS

About LIONS

LIONS is a collection of brands dedicated to helping today’s marketers and creatives show the value of investing in creativity. Many professionals know the organization best for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the annual Festival and Awards that recognize the industry’s most outstanding creative work. Today, LIONS brings together several well-known brands, including Contagious, WARC, Effie, Acuity Pricing, and the LIONS Intelligence platform. Collectively, it draws on more than 150 years of specialist knowledge to help marketers drive measurable business growth through creativity.

LIONS’ audience spans the entire creative marketing community — from students and emerging talent to senior agency leaders and chief marketing officers. Much of its email activity supports the annual Festival held each June. Email communications help delegates choose the right pass, plan their travel, explore hundreds of content sessions, and build valuable connections ahead of the event. These communications play a vital role in guiding attendees through complex event planning, ensuring they get the most value from their participation.

The work of the LIONS team, however, extends far beyond the Festival. Through initiatives such as the ERA Programme and See It Be It, it works to reach new and underrepresented creatives across the global industry. LIONS also engages senior marketing leaders through programs like the CMO Accelerator while expanding into new audiences with LIONS Sport, which creates dedicated opportunities for sports brands, agencies, rights holders, and media. This broad, evolving audience makes email a critical channel for staying connected with professionals across the entire global marketing ecosystem.

Challenge: Overcoming rigid templates and giving the team creative control

For LIONS, email plays a central role in supporting its global audience, especially during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. During the event, daily morning emails are among the main ways delegates plan their schedules and stay informed about major announcements and key highlights. 

Email also stands out as a channel that gives the team full creative control over how messages look and feel. Unlike social media or other platforms, it allows them to shape the experience on their own terms without adapting content to strict platform limitations.

What I'm most passionate about personally, though (and how I ended up accidentally building a career on email marketing, really) is the flexibility and creative control email gives me. No other platform really gives us as much ownership over the look, feel, and relevance of a message as email does.

Olly Browning,

Head of Digital Creative at LIONS.

Before adopting Stripo, the LIONS email production process was hindered by several limitations related to the functionality of its previous builder:

• it wasn’t the most intuitive platform;
• it ran entirely on fixed templates that had to be produced and coded for the LIONS team externally.

For example, if the team was building an email and realized halfway through that it required a dark-mode template — or needed to be an operational email with different footer links, they had to rebuild the entire campaign from scratch; there was no flexibility.

Adding new content modules was equally challenging. Even minor updates, such as introducing a new section to highlight pass types, required external support, adding unnecessary time and cost to routine tasks.

Maintaining brand consistency added another layer of complexity. The LIONS brand relies on a minimalist visual style, a limited color palette, and carefully chosen typography that lets featured creative work take center stage. While essential, keeping this level of design consistency across emails was essential but not easy with previous tools. 

The old system required manual, error-prone steps such as adding tracking parameters to links and repeatedly searching for the correct color codes. These repetitive tasks slowed down production and made it harder for the team to focus on creating visually strong, on-brand communications.

The LIONS brand itself is quite minimalist by design; we like to let the creative work we feature be the star of the show. That means a limited color palette and very deliberate use of typography to create impact. Trying to keep that consistency in email felt just as vital.

Olly Browning,

Head of Digital Creative at LIONS.

Solution: Choosing a flexible email builder that empowers teams to work independently

The decision to adopt Stripo at LIONS was influenced by prior hands-on experience. Before joining the company, Olly worked on email campaigns through his own creative agency, Mighty Oak, where a friend first recommended Stripo. After seeing how much work could be brought in-house with the platform, it quickly became his preferred tool for designing and building emails.

That early experience demonstrated how the right solution could transform efficiency, making it clear that adopting a similar approach at LIONS would elevate the organization’s email workflows.

When evaluating tools, the team focused on solving the exact bottlenecks that had made their previous system difficult to use. 

Stripo stood out because it offered:

• the ability to build and edit freely in-house; 
• a flexible and intuitive module system; 
• proper brand controls; 
• no reliance on external developers for routine production tasks. 

Another critical factor was the need to support collaboration and scale email creation across multiple teams and brands. The goal was not only to simplify technical production but also to empower more colleagues to create high-quality emails independently.

I'm still deeply passionate about email, but I needed to find a way to empower more of our teams (and now, more of our brands!) to make great emails independently.

By doing that, I've freed myself up to bring my email marketing skills and experience to more campaigns at a higher level, rather than being one of the only people who could actually build anything.

Olly Browning,

Head of Digital Creative at LIONS.

Workflow: Building emails collaboratively and scaling production across teams

After adopting Stripo, LIONS restructured its email production process to enable faster, more natural collaboration. Instead of relying on sequential handoffs between marketers and designers, the team shifted to a more collaborative workflow that allows multiple contributors to work on the same email simultaneously.

My Wow-moment in working with Stripo was realizing I could create entirely new modules (full, ready-to-send sections) and add them to our shared library for anyone on the team to drag and drop into any email. That alone has been genuinely transformative for my team’s and my workflow.

Olly Browning,

Head of Digital Creative at LIONS.

Several features have become genuinely indispensable:

• reusable modules are used daily. If a module created for one campaign works well in another, it is added to a shared library where colleagues can simply drag and drop it into their emails. This capability has been quietly transformative for day-to-day production;
• reliable autosave has made a noticeable difference in peace of mind. Knowing that changes are saved automatically reduces the risk of losing work during high-pressure production cycles;
• inline collaboration and comments have improved how the team approaches production. Instead of creating mockups in external tools like Figma — where marketers cannot edit the content themselves, the team now builds directly within the email. Marketers can draft most of the campaign independently, while designers work alongside them in real time rather than joining later in the process;
• automatic tracking parameters (UTMs) have removed the need for manual setup and significantly reduced the number of QA issues. This has made the workflow easier for team members without technical backgrounds;
• synchronized modules mean the team no longer needs to search for outdated footer links or rebuild elements from older templates. Updates can be applied consistently across campaigns.

Brand consistency

Stripo has made maintaining brand consistency much more achievable in several ways: 

• bringing the brand font into the platform, with carefully selected fallback options for unsupported email clients, ensures every email feels on-brand from the start, even without additional design work;
• having exact brand colors available in the color picker ensures consistency across the entire team and saves time spent searching for hex codes;
• more broadly, access to a larger library of pre-built modules and easily editable elements has empowered marketers to create more content independently. This has freed up design time, allowing the team to focus more on “hero moments” and key visual assets.

Onboarding process

Another key improvement has been the speed at which new team members can start working with the platform. The interface is intuitive enough that onboarding does not require lengthy training sessions. Many users have been able to jump in and learn the essentials quickly, making adoption easier and more widespread than expected.

Versatile email campaigns designed by the LIONS team using the Stripo editor

Some of the most notable email campaigns created using Stripo are call for entries and speaker submissions, delegate registration and ticket sales, event schedules and session highlights, and award updates, attendee follow-ups, and post-event communications.

Here are a few examples that Olly Browning shared with us.

• Speaker announcement email

Last year, when global icon Serena Williams, filmmaker Jon M. Chu, and other industry leaders were announced as the first speakers for Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2025, the team built a short, highly focused email to deliver the news instantly and clearly.

(Source: Email by LIONS)

It might sound silly, but our previous system didn't really let us create simple, impactful sends like this: the template forced us to bulk it out with unnecessary buttons, copy, and links, so being able to send something light, simple, and compelling felt really exciting.

Olly Browning,

Head of Digital Creative at LIONS.

• Eurobest Awards email

Eurobest, one of the regional LIONS Awards, has always had a bold and vibrant brand identity. Previously, its email templates did not fully reflect this visual style. That changed after redesigning the template using Stripo.

By combining GIFs, background colors, and brand fonts in live text sections, the team created emails that felt both visually distinctive and more accessible. This approach allowed them to move beyond standard award communications and produce messages that felt unique to the Eurobest brand without sacrificing clarity or usability.

(Source: Email by LIONS)

• Content streams launch email

Last year, LIONS introduced a new visual system for its Content Streams. This design language created to help Festival delegates quickly identify and choose the sessions most relevant to them.

With Stripo, the team brought this visual system directly into their email communications. During the program launch, color-coded elements did more than add visual interest; they helped delegates navigate the sessions before arriving at the Festival, turning each email into a practical planning tool.

(Source: Email by LIONS)

• Pre-festival countdown email

As the Festival approaches, daily communications become increasingly important for attendees. With Stripo, the team enhanced these early communications by introducing countdown timers and thoughtfully structured modules. These elements helped build anticipation while keeping essential information easy to find. By placing key details front and center before the Festival started, these emails served as a reliable starting point for delegates preparing for their experience.

(Source: Email by LIONS)

• Daily Festival email

During the Festival, daily delegate emails must convey a significant amount of information. This includes updates, schedules, and announcements that attendees rely on throughout the event. Stripo helped the team structure these content-heavy emails so they remained easy to scan and visually engaging. Even with large volumes of information, the emails stayed readable and valuable, allowing delegates to quickly find the details they needed without feeling overwhelmed.

(Source: Email by LIONS)

Results: Faster production, wider adoption, and stronger brand consistency across teams

Since adopting Stripo, LIONS has seen improvements across multiple areas of its email production process. The most noticeable shifts include faster workflows, broader team involvement, and heightened design consistency across all brands. These outcomes reflect the original goal of making email production more flexible while allowing more teams to contribute independently.

• Faster and more streamlined production

Production has become noticeably faster and easier to manage. Routine tasks that previously required external support or repetitive manual work are now handled directly by internal teams. 

• More time for strategic and creative work

Another important result has been the ability to shift focus from production to strategy. With more team members building their own emails, the core email specialists have been able to spend less time acting as the only people responsible for creating campaigns. 

• Greater agility and improved collaboration across brands

Inline collaboration tools have helped teams work more quickly and respond to changes with greater flexibility. Feedback can be shared directly in the email, significantly reducing delays and helping campaigns move forward faster. 

• Improved design quality, consistency, and engagement

While specific performance metrics remain confidential, the team observed a clear improvement in the visual quality and consistency of their emails. More consistent branding, better structured layouts, and stronger visual relevance have contributed to higher engagement across campaigns. 

Wrapping up

For LIONS, email is more than just a communication channel. It is a key tool for guiding audiences, supporting large-scale events, and maintaining a consistent brand experience across multiple teams and brands. By moving from rigid templates to a flexible workflow with Stripo, the organization has simplified its production process and empowered more colleagues to create emails independently — all while maintaining world-class visual standards at scale.