Hillsboro 3 Launch
(SERVICES)
Creative Strategy
Campaign Design
Experiential
(YEAR)
2021
The facility before the facility
Modern business depends on infrastructure most people never see.
The power has to hold. The network has to reach. The systems have to recover. The experience has to continue.
Hillsboro 3 was Flexential’s answer to that invisible demand: a major data center expansion built for high-density capacity, connectivity, resilience, and the next stage of hybrid IT growth. But the facility was still becoming real. Customers could not yet walk the halls, see the equipment, or feel the scale of the place.
The launch had to make the value visible before the building could speak for itself.
Building the Next Edge became the campaign platform for that moment. It framed Hillsboro 3 as both a construction milestone and a signal of what Flexential was helping enterprises prepare for next.
The Tension
The project unfolded under COVID-era uncertainty.
Flexential needed to prepare for two possible launch realities at the same time. If regulations and safety requirements allowed, the launch needed to support an in-person groundbreaking with guests, travel, hospitality, signage, sales materials, and a full onsite experience. If restrictions remained in place, the launch had to become a live broadcast that could still feel polished, credible, and connected to the scale of the investment.
That uncertainty changed the creative problem.
The work was not only about announcing a data center. It was about designing a launch system flexible enough to function as an in-person event, a livestream, a sales tool, a campaign, and a market signal.
The audience made the pressure larger. Flexential needed to reach enterprise prospects, partners, IT infrastructure leaders, C-level executives, internal teams, and major technology companies. The event had to feel worthy of the companies watching and the infrastructure being introduced.
The Idea
The creative response was to treat the launch like a broadcast campaign, not a conventional groundbreaking.
My broadcast background became central to the work. A livestream has to move differently than a static campaign. Graphics need to read quickly. Speaker moments need structure. The visual system has to support pacing, clarity, transitions, title cards, holding screens, and live timing without overwhelming the people on screen.
At the same time, the campaign still had to build anticipation before the event. Emails, landing pages, digital media, sales communications, and launch materials needed to court the audience in advance and give them a reason to show up.
Building the Next Edge gave all of that work a center. “Building” grounded the campaign in the physical site. “Next” pointed toward future demand. “Edge” connected the facility to proximity, latency, connectivity, resilience, and the changing shape of enterprise infrastructure.
The line allowed the campaign to hold both realities at once: a building under construction and a future already arriving.
The System
The launch system moved in three connected layers.
The first layer built anticipation. Before the event, the campaign needed to make Hillsboro 3 feel like a major business moment, not a construction update. Digital communications, landing pages, email touchpoints, campaign graphics, and sales-facing materials helped invite the right audience into the story and gave Flexential’s teams a shared language for why the facility mattered.
The second layer prepared for two event realities. We developed the creative system so it could support an onsite launch if needed, while also building the livestream as a fully produced experience. That meant planning for physical signage, event graphics, environmental branding, executive participation, speaker support, on-screen graphics, motion, pacing, and remote-viewer clarity at the same time.
The third layer connected the launch to sales. Hillsboro 3 was not only an event. It was a business-development tool. The campaign had to translate technical infrastructure into customer relevance: high-density capacity, network reach, power, resilience, cooling, continuity, and the ability to support future enterprise demand. Every surface had a job, from digital ads to livestream graphics to sales materials to the physical construction site.
The result was one campaign built to work across digital, physical, and live conditions. It made an unfinished facility feel present, valuable, and ready for serious enterprise consideration.
The Outcome
The livestream became the connective moment. With roughly a thousand people watching across industries, including stakeholders from major technology and Fortune 100 and 500 companies, the launch gave Hillsboro 3 visibility at a moment when in-person events could not be relied on.
The campaign helped turn a remote-first groundbreaking into a high-value business moment. It gave sales, leadership, marketing, and event teams one story to carry forward. It made the facility easier to understand before it was complete and helped position Hillsboro 3 as a serious platform for high-density enterprise infrastructure.
The launch helped support a major enterprise outcome: Hillsboro 3’s available capacity was committed, with NVIDIA taking the available space. The visibility created through the launch also helped reinforce Flexential’s position in a related NVIDIA opportunity around liquid-cooling infrastructure, connecting the campaign to a larger story of high-density compute, power, cooling, and future enterprise demand.
Either way, the deeper value was clear. Building the Next Edge made unseen infrastructure feel tangible. It turned a construction site into a launch platform, a livestream into a business-development tool, and a technical facility into a story customers could understand and act on.
