Campaign
Challenge: Help Microsoft support sellers in the field better understand how they fit in to the customers' goals while fostering a sense of pride in what is being accomplished and the inspiration to do more
Role: Creative Director, executive producer
Business Partner:
Communications Director: Sharman Ghio
Support:
Art Director, producer: Anya Ermakova (DesignIt)
Director of Photography: Brett Bollier (DesignIt)
Binge-able, yet snackable content
As customer expectations have evolved, so is the need for companies to be more agile and flexible in their offerings. The need is more to create value while driving consumption, but to ensure that their end-to-end experience feels easy and connected...not just from a product perspective, but from a relationship perspective: how do companies build trust that promotes a long term relationship? As Microsoft had evolved their post purchase support strategy (CCE), the need because clear that they needed to share what success looked like to create greater clarity in role.
Obviously, the challenge existed to maximize views while ensuring we're not taking up too much of the field roles' time dedicated to supporting their customers. So in breaking down how to best do this, my team and I looked towards what had been working for streaming services in creating episodic content that can be consumed on the viewers' own time and was desired to be viewed. So, we needed to create something that was relatable, aspirational, short, scalable, and informational. No problem.
Breaking it down
Since we were still deep in Covid protocol, but had already experienced the easing of some restrictions, I made the decision to create a pilot "season" virtually and then as soon as another round of easing occurred make preparations to shoot multiple customers in a short period of time. Since we were only alocated $50,000 to make what amounted to 16 videos, efficiency and strategy were key. I needed to dust off my skills and build the creative toolkit as well as support as much of the production/post production as possible.
Delivering success
By working with the same team over a short time frame, and staying hands-on throughout the process, we were able to execute a consistent, high quality, concise series of stories that became a beloved part of the company culture with teams jockeying to be the next featured.
Further, we were able to maximize the economy of scale by using the opportunities to be back on location the seasons 2 and 3 provided to begin capturing and building a library of b-roll to use in later projects allowing me to spread the costs out even more.
